[eshvk]

> I find all of them hard to work with, because they are all aiming for the modern day "zero configuration" nirvana that Ruby on Rails achieved, and thus enormous amounts of implicit knowledge is required to understand them.

> ... realised there is a theoretical path from ignorance to enlightenment that didn't involve learning Groovy.

Yes! Learning is so non-linear that sure there are in theory fine lines that minimize the amount of new stuff to learn. Yet, it never is that simple. Bad design, indeed.

> What you would probably like is Gant, which is Ant entirely converted to Groovy. It's missing all the higher level project stuff from Maven / Gradle, but it works a treat when you just want the simplest possible thing that could work.

I will check it out; thank you!