Gradle Versus Make
I needed to make a rpm from various bits and pieces, some of them java, some of them native.
I thought this was a job for Gradle, rather than Maven, because there was a lot of fiddling with files back and forth. nothing complicated, but still, maven isn't really good at that sort of thing.
After some hacking, I got mad, put my Gradle prototype on a Usb stick and stomped on it and threw it out the window.
In the end I did a Make file, which I should have done from the beginning.
Very few recent build tools present innovative features that are actually worth the bother.