[lobofta]

Almost 40 years of software development and I think you're overlooking the strength of Gradle. Before Gradle if you wanted any kind of build step that was slightly outside of the norm you had to roll your own maven plugin or god forbid try to script something with ant in xml. Using a DSL in a scripting language was a smart move.

What I hated most about Gradle is that groovy is untyped. You'd make a change and wait for your build to complete only to find out minutes later that you made a typo or some other innocuous mistake. Glad they introduced Kotlin DSL.

I didn't notice the breaking changes much when we heavily used gradle. Gradle also comes with gradlew, which bootstraps your gradle project with the exact gradle version that is needed to build that project, so you can take an old gradle project and build it regardless of all those breaking changes that you mention.

[isbvhodnvemrwvn]

Friction made people think if they really need this custom step, now every single gradle project has a lot of poorly thought out custom stuff, often something which doesn't belong there.

[DrScientist]

Exactly.

Just like being weightless is fun - until you need to go to the toilet.

Friction or gravity in systems like this is a feature not a problem.