I have a machine with two quad-core CPUs, I want to run 8 parallel jobs at a time!

Most of these make replacements start with design decisions (like using Python) that pretty much rule out ever reaching what make does best, and which is essential to get my build times improved by at least a factor of 6.

Using a tool (like CMake) to generate your Makefiles is an excellent solution, heck, even a Python script that generated a Makefile and then ran make would be to prefer over this tool.