I agree completely, and I think the blame rests with Ant and Java. Java's dependency management was painful enough to deal with in 'make' that Ant was built to

I agree completely, and I think the blame rests with Ant and Java. Java's dependency management was painful enough to deal with in 'make' that Ant was built to support building Java projects. But in doing so the authors threw away the explicit file dependencies that made 'make' so powerful in the first place. Instead it got people to think in terms of a graph of 'tasks', each of which could either figure out its own dependency management, or more commonly ignore them completely. Most tools that followed seem to have gone down the 'graph of tasks' avenue, with 'graph of file dependencies' as an additional mechanism if you're lucky. The huge Rakefiles you've seen could possibly have simply benefited from a rewrite in Rake. Rake has 'file' tasks which implement the file dependencies of 'make' but for some reason most users of Rake seem to ignore them completely.