[eeperson]

I can understand making that interpretation at first glance.

I agree that the process of building should be the primary focus of a build tool. I also, think that the secondary purpose is to make development easier. That is why you do 'rake rails' instead of having to use cap to deploy your changes locally. It's not that hard to come across a scenario that falls in to one of these goals that requires custom logic (like copying a file, or something similar). Some of this should go in custom plugins so it can be reused. However, some of it is small and non-generic and makes no sense as a plugin. The solution you pointed to for copying a file involves substantially more code to include and configure the plugin than it would take in other JVM build tools (such as SBT or Gradle) to simply specify that you want to copy a file.

I agree that doing deployment for final builds or to shared environments are better served by a different tool.