Accomplishing what I thought were standard tasks with Gradle always felt like fragile hacks. The nature of being a younger build system with more API evolution

Accomplishing what I thought were standard tasks with Gradle always felt like fragile hacks. The nature of being a younger build system with more API evolution means there are at least 3 ways to do something, without good explanation, and they often can’t be mixed. Maven feels like a build system that I’m configuring. Gradle feels like a piece of software that I’m developing to build my project. I will say, Gradles files and console output is usually easier on the eyes. And Maven seems to needlessly re-build things when Gradle does not. Still, I want to fiddle with my project, not my build scripts.