[switchbak]

I think folks just get used to Maven-induced constraints (this applies to SBT, Bazel, others too). When you free yourself from that you realize: builds just aren't all that hard, it's often the tooling that becomes a real limitation.

Of course, sometimes the limitations are good: preventing you from doing "the wrong thing", or encouraging cacheability, etc. But as with any abstraction layer - getting a model that fits across so many disparate use cases can be very challenging.