I had the same reaction to the atkins maple syrup but swirling a ton of butter into it vastly improves it.

I did a search and found a recipe for you:

Ingredients
Sweetener for 2 cups sugar
2 tb Maple flavour
2 cups water
about 1/2 ts guar gum

Preparing
Heat water with sweetener and flavour, util boiling. Add the guar gum to thicken
the mixture.

Mind you, I haven't tried it, but it is very similar to the recipe I used with real sugar. The trick to thick is to cook away some of the liquid. The longer you cook the thicker it gets.