[blandflakes]

Maven is IMO the best choice for Java and Kotlin, but even maven is stupidly complex. It's sort of maddening that all JVM languages seem to suffer from clunky build tooling, though I'm certainly glad that they work as well as they do.

[hackerm0nkey]

I like the stability of Maven, despite XML and people complaining about it's complexity, I just find it stable enough and does the job quite well.

For one of my clients, we created lots of similar microservices, similar setup but slightly differ. What I did was creating a template using maven archetypes so spinning up a new microservice for a new piece of work or simply to try something out or an ad-hoc job is a matter of seconds, so setup time is stopped being a hindrance to start something new.

Also these days there are quite few tooling that supports project generators which can give you a bit of setup to start from.