The Netbeans build system

This is more of a "venting frustration" than informative. I have been using netbeans for a while now, at least the re-branded version that is jMonkeEngine SDK. However, this is about the netbeans part of it and nothing to do with the jME SDK.
I have been thinking for years that I should port Svansprogram to a Rich Client Platform instead of hacking my own. Hacking my own RCP was fun at first but now it is mostly tedious.
So to learn module development on Netbeans I have started out with some small hacks to get a feel for it. Ran the Hello World things and so on.
Eventually came the time to make my very own module, first I let Netbeans create the project, then I put it into my version control and then on to set up my continuous build system.
The build system in netbeans is Ant. Which is all very fine by me, Ant+Ivy is my preference if I can choose whatever I like. It is always good if the IDE understands the real build system, i.e. the headless builds run on the build server. You know, the real build, that produces the installable binaries.
Eclipse has a totally separate build system so you need to keep the IDE and the real build in synch using plugins and other voodoo. So if Netbeans have some build system that I can use in both the IDE and on the CI machine I'm a happy camper. So with a smile on my face I set out to run the netbeans project on the CI machine.
That is when the horror starts.
The way netbeans set up the builds is to have some archane and weirdly mutated Ant scripts, without documentation, importing things from secret directories. Then have some plugins in the IDE that knows the secret locations to insert values here and there. I have never in my life as a professional coder seen a more opaque and strange build system.
For example, it uses an Ant plugin called CopyLibs to, you know, copy JAR-files it needs for the build. It makes me want to grab the engineer by the throat and foaming at the mouth scream at them that ANT already can copy files or why don't you just use Ivy.
So in order for my CI machine to even be able to get all the required dependencies I have to pollute my Ant installation making it harder to have reproducible builds since now my entire build system is dependent on a specific version of Netbeans.
It does not stop there, to make a plugin for Netbeans I must of course build and link and all that against a specific version of Netbeans. This is acheived by including build scripts from a "Harness" directory that is specific to a version of Netbeans. This is all understandable, but the location of this harness-directory is set up in a "private" property file, through one or two ant properties with closely guarded complex names. The private property file is actually hidden in $HOME.
Yeah you heard me, to make the CI machine build it will have to have access to my $HOME to be able to find the harness directory that is from my _installation_ of netbeans, not from some central repository of dependecies.
There are some other ant-voodoo that Netbeans hides in a FAQ to instruct people how to download the harness from the web instead of pointing the CI machine to an actual installation of netbeans. I say it again, an installation, that requires you to run an installer, and click through stuff.
There is more to this story but now I need to go cry in a dark corner. It has taken me several weeks of hobby-coding time to even get this far, and then to realize that netbeans generates images when building so you have to remember to set the JVM as headless or the build fails. And oh yeah, when I did it generated blank images so my menu entries when the module is installed are empty lines.