Here's a post about what I did: http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/02/ninja.h...
Personally, this meant the error messages I got were helpful enough that my first meson-built project was working after a half-hour of deciding to port it over despite using several system libraries and doing compile-time code generation.
Meson's language is not Turing-complete, so it's easy to analyze for errors. Unlike CMake and autotools, Meson's language looks like a real (pythonish) programming language, and it isn't string-oriented; dances of escaping, substitution, and unescaping are uncommon.
Compared to autotools or hand-rolled Makefiles, CMake is a step in the right direction; meson is a leap.
CMake tries hard to to do better, but then introduces its own layers of craziness. So it's fine as long as I am not doing anything unusual, but as soon as I need to understand what is going on, I find a dizzying array of barely working moving parts beneath me.