Mitigating verbosity of Maven pom.xml files (or: a critique of Maven by a fan)

I like maven. I even like it very very much. Since I switched to it from Ant I have saved lots of hours of works, building build files, administrating dependencies, etc, and saved lots of space in my source control repository.

The problem is that maven files are too verbose. Not that Ant files where less verbose, but their verbosity was appropriate for what they do.

For example, instead of writing:

<dependencies>
<dependency>
    <groupId>commons-logging</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-logging</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.1</version>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.myosproject</groupId>
    <artifactId>superlibrary</artifactId>
    <version>7.5</version>
</dependency> 
<dependency>
    <groupId>junit</groupId>
    <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
    <version>3.8.1</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
  </dependency>
</dependencies> 

I would like to write something like

<dependencies>
    commons-logging/commons-logging/1.1.1
    com.myosproject/superlibrary/7.5
    test:junit/junit/3.8.1
</dependencies>

Or instead of

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
             <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
                 <configuration>
                     <source>1.5</source>
                     <target>1.5</target>
                 </configuration>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>

I would like

<build version="1.5"/>

And (last example and we are done), instead of writing:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>