However, i've found that i do not notice that so much and get much more benefit from gradle then ant. Also, the project structure has ended up being alot cleaner and easier to navigate for me. Plus, I like all the slick IntelliJ style features.
As for the giant effort to switch? I'd say gradle is a big one.
It was also educational just how big a performance difference at code or xml editing existed between ADT and the same Eclipse installation on a vanilla Java project: the latter is like using a machine a decade newer.
The tools people have always had a casual disregard for NDK users too, who make a disproportionately large amount of the Play Store revenue. The whole thing has never seemed like it was dog fooded at all, just developed for amusement.