[ygra]

I've redone the build system at work completely half a year ago, as some .vcxproj files have gone through a few upgrade processes since VC++ 6 projects. Needless to say there was a lot of cruft in there. You can do a lot of nice things by offloading configuration into property sheets and including them as needed and this more or less cut down the project files to a list of dependencies and a list of files. It also doesn't help to have add-ins that insert custom build rules for every file where each change to some configuration property changes about 50 points in the project file.

I think it comes down to: Auto-generated build files are always horrible to read; write them yourself once you know what you're doing. It's probably a bit worse with MSBuild projects as Visual Studio uses them as its native project format, whereas no one else tries that with Makefiles (for good reason, I guess).