[bshimmin]

Thank you for your thoughtful and considered response. I'll just leave out the bit about drills, because debating analogies is always unwise, especially if the analogous subject is outside of one's area of expertise!

> The crux of my point is that this isn't a useful question to ask. The question should be more along the lines of Q. "I need a way to run some custodial tasks related to the operation of my application, what should I use to accomplish this?"

I think you've just rephrased the question, no? We all know that "run[ning] some custodial tasks" is what a task runner does; but many wise people have expended many words telling you which of these increasingly fancy task runners you absolutely must use, ecosystems have built up around them, and the waxing of one and the waning of another does have a significant impact on the decision-making process.

> These tools didn't just emerge from the ether, they were created in response to specific issues.

I'm not sure people were really desperate to move from "configuration to code" or thought they really needed streams in their task runner before they were told they did, so for me I struggle a little to see what the "specific issue" was that gulp solved over grunt. The movement away from grunt and gulp to npm scripts and even crusty old make(1) is, of course, at least partly in reaction to the added complexity of these task runners - so in a way that's almost like unsolving a "specific issue".