About 9 out of 10 gradle build configurations that I have encountered fail to build something. That's surprising, and infuriating given that:
* Gradle is based on a portability layer, the JVM.
* Gradle competes against a portable and relatively reliable build system, Maven, and competes against make, which is non-portable due to its use of the system shell for arbitrary code. I would take Maven or make over Gradle any way of the week.
I have one other major beef with Gradle: every single Gradle-based project I have encountered on GitHub includes the Gradle JAR file. The author wants me to download and execute arbitrary Java code without even the option of inspecting it! To hell with that!
I had a breakthrough with Gradle recently: Gradle builds that fail on my Fedora laptop work just fine in an Ubuntu "toolbox" container. So much for portability!
Like the author of the article, I have devoted several (not as many) hours to understanding Gradle. It is largely incomprehensible, when encountered in the wild.