Honestly. I used to build the buildmaster for Ant builds back in the day. They could actually be quite incredibly elegant (if you used Ant-contrib). The reason

Honestly. I used to build the buildmaster for Ant builds back in the day. They could actually be quite incredibly elegant (if you used Ant-contrib). The reason was actually a lack of magic. SURE, ant was very verbose compared to modern build systems, but it did a lot of things relatively straightforward. You invoke tools in the chain you want. Today it is very different. There is a huge chain of auto-wiring tools with very cryptic error messages. To just build a basic ES6 javascript webpack project with React I need over 800 libraries, many of which are automagically invoked via convention. I literally have no idea what my build does, and hope my lucky underwear actually works today. Most of the time I am browsing through weird bug reports trying random snippets on the internet because there's no sane way to debug anything. So the point is, explicit is a huge virtue. It is code you can trace and debug. Sure it adds a bit of time, but it is time up front that saves A LOT down stream. Meanwhile today's tools are built to save time up front and waste time downstream. You either follow the exact formula the original developers wanted or you're shit out of luck.