Gradle is really powerful if you know what you're doing and you take the time and effort to keep your build optimized, sane, and working. I recently built a Gradle plug-in that allows us to build native components on a remote system (z/OS) and integrate these tasks and artifacts with the native Gradle model so that Gradle takes care of caching and parallel task execution. I'm sure this is possible with other build to…
> you take the time and effort to keep your build optimized, sane, and working But isn't the key job of a build system to 'just work'. Ie it's executable documentation of how to build/test the software. ie really shouldn't need constant maintenance, especially if the code hasn't changed.
We are a large enterprise shop with many projects being built on different machines, architectures, technologies, etc. We took the time to become decent in Gradle, and it works great for us.