I have nothing against Maven. It's just that I sometimes don't see the point.
I started on a Confluence plugin today. Of course I followed the instructions on the Atlassian website... after a while. I ordered mvn to eclipse:eclipse and... I had to wait for an hour. 574 (!) jar files later I could start doing what I planned to have finished already. Why would I have to wait to start coding on an example plugin for an hour?
What is wrong with a plugin-blank.tar.gz? Just a simple archive with all the stuff you need. All the jar dependencies, a working example doing... well nothing much. And last, but not least a build file (ant will do).
I would like to encourage companies like Atlassian to not go the Maven route... only. There is nothing wrong with having a simple example tar file available for the impatient.