I delivered a session at JavaOne (2001?) on Ant (I was a whiz at it). Then, I had to learn Maven as it gained traction. I'm currently doing Android development, but I'm a little embarrassed to say that I don't really grok Gradle the way I do with Ant and Maven. I don't have anything against Gradle. I just don't want to spend another minute of my life learning another Java build tool. So, I stick to the Gradle defaults when creating a new project in Android Studio, and rely on SO and whatnot whenever I need to customize. Haven't been burned yet.