I think a lot of the incompatibility you are seeing in the Gradle plugin ecosystem is a problem specific to Gradle. My experience has been that Gradle plugins

I think a lot of the incompatibility you are seeing in the Gradle plugin ecosystem is a problem specific to Gradle. My experience has been that Gradle plugins aren't isolated very well and as such tend to have conflicts. This combined with the fact certain pieces of core functionality tends to be tied to specific plugins (such as the 'provided' scope being tied to the 'war' plugin), results in situations like this where you need different plugins depending on what other plugins you have installed. I haven't seen this same problem on build tools that have more clearly defined integration points.