<p>I have recently started exploring Maven, but I feel a bit overwhelmed of all xml configuration in all the pom files. Are there any good tools i can use?</p>

When I edit any XML files, I use
vim
with the
xmledit
plugin.
Another good tool for XML editing is
XMLmind XML editor
.  It's free for non-commercial use.  It supports validating XML with W3C XML Schema (and other schema formats), so you can be sure to produce
valid POM format
.