I find that a lot easier to track. BTW you can also see some tasks which you can only dream of with standard Maven command line..

Right, but Lucene is based on Ant. Different animal. It is a "shortcoming" of maven that is does/cannot report on the tasks it executes. If you want something like this we should change build system, either Ant or Gradle. Adding another wrapper script does imo make no sense. It is undermining the build system and build.

Also even though the different targets are listed, it still for example does not list how to jar the artifacts while skipping the test. I would very much assume there is some sort of skip attribute. IMO we should work with the tool at hand. If we agree that the tool is not good enough anymore, we should consider switching tool, instead of bolting things on. Given that we have now quite some experience with Gradle a switch to Gradle should not be hard. You get your task reporting facility, your ability to create new tasks and so on. you even get your wrapper script, but in this case it is a wrapper provided by the build tool!