Gradle is one of the worst things about Android development. I’d rather use make files or even ant.
I had to spend some time actually learn groovy in order to understand what is happening and have some kinds of love-hate relationship with it. One one hand it shows that java is a bit too verbose and could have had the same functionality with less hassle. One the other hand they took too far trying to look like a declarative language which creates a lot of confusion.
But the worst part is that there is no easy way to debug.