[greyfairer]

If you ever worked on a project with more than one developer, and found out that your product worked if you built it on your machine, but not on anyone else's machine, even if they have the same code, only then you will appreciate maven.

Maven is about much more than just in-project dependencies. It's also about unifying external dependencies (where to download them from, ...), build tool configuration, source code organisation, etc. Whatever it takes to make sure that a build is reproducible.