Absolute majority of people I witnessed using Gradle (myself including) approached it with almost religious terror. Making a change - any change - is akin to playing Russian Roulette, except all chambers but one are loaded. Change one directive - and your build breaks in most weird and incomprehensible ways.

And then there is the whole notion of stability (I mean "contract stability.") Almost every single release of Gradle breaks things in some subtle ways. I can take a project from the olden UNIX days with its Makefile and that Makefile will work in gmake in the freshest Linux distro, using gmake release that was produced multiple decades after Stu Feldman's make. It doesn't require a very specific version of libc or kernel. Because it is 1. Written portably and 2. It treats its behavior (jokes about using the Tab character aside) as a contract and it doesn't violate it just because some poorly educated software engineer decided that it would be a good idea to change the behavior in the upcoming release.

I have an unreasonable hatred of gradle and its imperative, choose-your-own-language build files, every buildfile being structured differently.

Hateful.

Not even talking about how slow it is, no I don't want the garbage demon running somewhere.

I think any complicated build system will eventually devolve regardless of the build tool if it's not properly maintained; the variability of the required tasks is just too high.

Gradle does seem to be moving fast with regards to Java support in general changes and improvements in the build tool. It takes effort to keep up, but it's worthwhile.