I think a lot of it is that people are scared of automake, so they reinvent their own build systems, with varying degrees of badness. Then they claim that thei

I think a lot of it is that people are scared of automake, so they reinvent their own build systems, with varying degrees of badness. Then they claim that theirs is "easy" but they've only done the first half of "simple things should be easy, hard things should be possible". A properly autotooled package offers an amazing level of control about where to put things.