A lot of it is philosophical - for the reasons that I dislike Gradle, I dislike SBT, but SBT has the honor of also having historically (and thankfully since cle

A lot of it is philosophical - for the reasons that I dislike Gradle, I dislike SBT, but SBT has the honor of also having historically (and thankfully since cleaned up) esoteric syntax. I simply don't want builds to be allowed to reach the complexity that sbt allows. I would definitely agree with your point that most build tools aren't easy! I've used maven and grumbled about it, and I'm mostly sold on scripting my build in the same language I'm using anyway, but in my long time on the JVM, it's always been the gradle and sbt projects that end up with inscrutable and hard-to-follow build scripts. The sbt REPL also regularly breaks existing build scripts by changing how args are passed/parsed, or even how terminal color support works, and I just get sad every time I see a new, unexpected error from one of our CI runs.