[vroombaprime]

The custom tasks are never reusable - they are specific to that one build. If they ARE reusable they become gradle plugins, same as in maven.

Effort of banging out a custom task to make a tar in a particular way and get it published: gradle=a few lines of groovy, maven=a full plugin in java?

To be fair my maven experience is the lowest of all (between gradle/ant/make/maven), but I was being honest in that I would never want to go back to maven (or ant) - I get more things done faster in gradle.

What MrBuddyCasino mentioned about mediocre teams though, that is a real risk. I'd nominate one or two skilled people to create and maintain it, but be sure to crosstrain and use comments liberally. The initial learning curve on gradle can be brutal for complex projects.