Many have posted about gradle builds forced on them but I've found modern Gradle to be quite nice. I don't reach for anything too complex - I just list deps and

Many have posted about gradle builds forced on them but I've found modern Gradle to be quite nice. I don't reach for anything too complex - I just list deps and plugins. Writing new plugins is far easier with Gradle than Maven (and way way way less ugly to configure) and there are more plugins available (and usually of higher quality than their maven counterparts). Speed is significantly better than Maven. Incremental builds gave us back 80% of our time spent sitting on maven. Reusability is much better than maven too. There are definite footguns but if you can avoid them (which I understand requires work and itd be better if they were not there at all!) then Gradle is decent. Its no Cargo but woe is life. The few times I had to parse a file at build time to read some credentials in jenkins I've been grateful im using Gradle instead of Maven.