I've been doing jvm apps for almost 20yrs...
What builds need to do and what people made the builds do are completely different things.
I don't remember a single project I was involved in that could not had had a simpler build...
True. In our example we didn’t have to generate online help and pdf manuals from the same asciidoctor sources. But when we chose to, we really needed the customization that cradle offered.