Neither of these alternatives gets at the heart of what's hard about make, and that's which file depends on what other file(s) and how to create the dependencie

Neither of these alternatives gets at the heart of what's hard about make, and that's which file depends on what other file(s) and how to create the dependencies from the starting points. There's also the issue of what attribute organizes the dependencies. Make uses file timestamps, if the files already exist, but at least one particularly dreadful corporate build system I've used ordered dependencies on version numbers.