Oh man. It's not like I liked the idea of project.json, because it clearly has problems, like being rigid / not extensible. But I was hoping for a migration t

Oh man. It's not like I liked the idea of project.json, because it clearly has problems, like being rigid / not extensible. But I was hoping for a migration towards something like Maven / Gradle / SBT / Leiningen. And extending MSBuild is not a solution towards that. And it's really not about MSBuild being XML. No, this is about MSBuild being too freaking manual, in an Ant/Makefile fashion. Maven is declarative, it depends on established conventions with overridable settings and has plugins. And it takes care of everything, from dependency management, building, deployment, testing, continuous integration, metrics, etc, things for which people normally use Visual Studio or TFS or other third-party and usually incomplete, bloated and expensive solutions. And sure, providing command line tools that modify MSBuild is nice. But you know, the fact that you need a tool to modify MSBuild highlights a big problem. And no, it's not because of the XML.