Interesting discussion here. I've been very happy with Gradle for my first major JVM project, a small Kotlin API with a simple build configuration (https://github.com/thomasboyt/jam-buds/blob/master/rhiannon/...). I suppose I'm not surprised to see more complaints from folks who have worked with it on much longer-lived and _much_ more complex projects.

I've been thinking of taking a peek into Java, which I've never really written[1]. Is the general thinking that, for something like a Spring Boot application, it's much better to just start with Maven? I'll admit I am, aesthetically, displeased with the mountains of XML config I've seen in some tutorial articles, but I imagine it's a lot simpler to maintain over time than any DSL would be.

[1] slightly off-topic, but if anyone's curious why: I haven't been very impressed by any of the "Kotlin-first" JVM libraries I've seen (like ktor or exposed), I think coroutines are neat but much more suitable for main-thread-focused situations like Android apps than something more easily threaded like web servers (and with Project Loom hopefully upcoming in the next couple years this might be a moot point soon), and I don't like the JetBrains tooling lock-in (e.g there's no well-supported language server for Kotlin, unlike what Red Hat's been building for Java)