I'm with you. In fact my last project I simply wrote my own build script by including the dependencies that normally would have been wrapped with grunt / gulp a

I'm with you. In fact my last project I simply wrote my own build script by including the dependencies that normally would have been wrapped with grunt / gulp and used them directly. So much easier and far fewer development dependencies. Grunt and Gulp make building slightly easier. Slightly. That's really it honestly. In fact my build scripts look very, very similar to what a Gruntfile.js file looks like.