Absolutely. As I said, I have spent a while studying how to build a competitor, and actually have written my own build engine that runs on the JVM as part of th

Absolutely. As I said, I have spent a while studying how to build a competitor, and actually have written my own build engine that runs on the JVM as part of that! It powers Conveyor which is a build system for packaging and deploying desktop apps+servers (see my bio) and is by now very robust. So I'm very familiar with Gradle's problems and ways it could be better. Nonetheless, once you include all the plugins, Gradle has an enormous feature set. Usability is the clear problem with it, but it's also the vaguest. Pointing out problems is eashy, coming up with alternative designs is medium hard, getting everyone to agree those alternatives are better is really hard.