the documentation here is quite sparse, so correct me if i'm wrong. This seems like a dressed up theorem proving system like PROLOG dressed up as something new.
No, not really. The wikipedia page of Maude has a good explanation of what it is like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maude_system. You can also see the Maude book if you're interested [1].
I'm a bit out of my league here, but how does Maude compare to say Idris?
I remember dabbling with Pure, which used term rewriting, and lent itself to expressing mathematical equations in a familiar format, but it was not a prover.
I downloaded the PDF for Maude, and I will certainly take a look in the meantime. My interests are solely for learning, and I thought using something like Idris to work my way through Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, might drive it home for me in ways that my physics classes didn't.
[1]: http://maude.cs.illinois.edu/w/images/0/0d/Maude-book.pdf