[thejdude]

At least with Maven you have a standardized build process in every project. Checkout the code and be productive right away. It structures dependencies and project layout.

Currently I'm in a large enterprise project where the build department decided it was a good idea to reimplement a whole complex build in gradle (basically all that maven does by default). It didn't help that they didn't realize Gradle uses Maven conventions by default, ignored that and ran their own dependency system. The build is REALLY slow and really complex and nobody has any idea exactly what it does.

In ant having a non-standard project layout was ok, but then at least the build was FAST and didn't take half a minute just to START the build system.

I'm not yet sure if gradle actually IS better if you use it right, or if it's just a very very slow solution to a problem you shouldn't have it the first place if you do it right with something like maven.