True, they do call it a build system toolkit. But I think worse than the others is on the wrong track and the sentiment is too heavily influenced by your negati

True, they do call it a build system toolkit. But I think worse than the others is on the wrong track and the sentiment is too heavily influenced by your negative first impression. swtoolkit made scons really nice to work with (but couldn't fix the speed issues). It's a shame it was abandoned. In the same way, a thin layer of functions as demonstrated in the waf "toolkit" examples could lean on the power of waf and provide a build system every bit as snazzy as big, polished systems like bazel and buck, but it would work cross-platform out of the box and be extensible with only Python. But I think waf is close enough to being high level that no one bothers to create and polish a build system layer (maybe internally in companies, but the open source uses I've seen use pretty standard waf scripts).