CMake is "too complicated" and "you need to be an expert". Understandable, I suppose. There are certainly specific things in CMake which are pretty terrible, like the add_custom_command/add_custom_target dance, but from the perspective of someone who has had to become an expert in it (via ROS/catkin), I would be unlikely to give it up. There's just way too much stuff it gives you for free, especially when it comes to things like packaging, testing, etc.
Okay, the other thing I would say having examined this a bit is that GENie seems to be much more "project" oriented than CMake. CMake has a concept of projects, but its usual model centers around targets and directories as the main unit to reason about. That is, CMake's most native output format is a Makefile, with adapters to generate IDE projects.
GENie seems to be focused first and foremost on a project/solution-oriented IDE workflow, with the Makefile generator as the one that's tacked on. So I can definitely appreciate that if you're working on a project where everyone's in an IDE anyway, it would make sense to use a generator that has the IDE's concepts as a first class citizen.
CMake is "too complicated" and "you need to be an expert". Understandable, I suppose. There are certainly specific things in CMake which are pretty terrible, like the add_custom_command/add_custom_target dance, but from the perspective of someone who has had to become an expert in it (via ROS/catkin), I would be unlikely to give it up. There's just way too much stuff it gives you for free, especially when it comes to things like packaging, testing, etc.