It took me a while to warm up to Maven as well, but it was worth the effort. You really should move Maven to the top of your "must-learn" list, since it makes it a lot easier to work with other things.
The hard part is creating the POM. Here's some stuff for Spring that includes Spring components for use with JPA and the web framework. Remove any items that don't amuse you.
Also, of course, you need to define the spring version. Like so:
This properties element is at the bottom of my POM.
Yes, Maven is "magic", and I never liked that, but it's in large part because Maven is designed to be able to do lots of things while requiring minimal configuration. Installing Maven is simple. Just download the zipfile, explode it, set MAVEN_HOME to point to the root of the exploded ZIP, and add $MAVEN_HOME/bin (or %MAVEN_HOME%\bin) to your PATH.
Some useful Maven goals that a minimal POM can invoke:
mvn clean - Remove all constructed objects
mvn compile - compile only
mvn clean compile war - clean, then compile and build a WAR from the results (web project). The "war" goal doesn't compile, only archive, so we must explicitly compile.
mvn test - does a compile, runs unit tests, and builds test reports
mvn package - construct a target artefact. Implies compile and test
mvn install - does a "mvn package, then installs the artefact in your Maven archive, where it can be used as a dependency by other POMs
There are many other goals, including some specialized ones that invoke dependencies on Maven plugins and massive functions like "mvn site", which not only does a "mvn package", it uploads the package to a central Maven repository, builds constructs an entire website including javadocs and test reports and uploads
it, and so forth. You can also limit what tests (if any) are run for goals that request testing.