> Had I done all that in Gradle, I could have just thrown in a few lines of groovy and probably finished in a day "Probably"? "Thrown in"? Perhaps you can cut

> Had I done all that in Gradle, I could have just thrown in a few lines of groovy and probably finished in a day "Probably"? "Thrown in"? Perhaps you can cut and paste build scripts between Gradle projects, but write anything more than "a few lines" in Groovy and you're looking at huge maintenance problems, like something that evaluated as ["abc", "defg", "hij"] suddenly becoming ['a', 'b', 'c'] for reasons that become apparent only after hours of printing debug messages.