[ristos]

My 2c: Makefiles are excellent tech, just that a lot of people haven't learned to use it properly and use it as it was intended. I'm sure I'll get pushback, that's ok.

- Too basic: At least half of the software I use just uses plain makefiles and maybe a configure script. No autotools. I optionally run ./configure, and then make and make install, and it just works. I definitely wouldn't consider my setup to be a toy by any stretch of the imagination. It's built out of smaller programs that do one thing and one thing well.

- Too complicated: I don't know, I think make and how it works is really easy to understand to me at least. I guess everyone's had different experiences. Not necessarily your case, but I think usually it's because they had bad experiences that they probably blamed make for, when they were trying to build some complex project that either had a bad build setup itself (not make's fault), or without the requisite knowledge.

- No standard library: It's supposed to be tooling agnostic, which is what makes it universally applicable for a very wide range of tools, languages, and use cases. It's viewed as a feature, not a bug.

- Too constricting: I'm not sure what you mean here, it's designed to do one thing and one thing well. The simple layer is the dependency tracking.

- Too much magic: Cryptic or inconsistent syntax: See 'Too complicated'