Android development has regressed heavily

I've been building Android software since about 1.5, and these days I can't even create an empty project that builds with Google's toolkit

-> create an empty project, hit build, get weird gradle error messages, .so issues, compilation problems, internal IDE errors, UI previewer doesn't work due to some old .jar that gradle has pulled down, and so on.

and pressing "build" takes 60 seconds on an empty project!

vs. the old ant system that seemed to work out of the box, and would build under a second

(and I pay the Jetbrains subscription for IntelliJ for my non-Android work! and love IntelliJ!)