Sorry that you feel this way, but this is simply not true. If it were the case, why would all these companies [0] waste their time with Gradle? Bad technologies tend do die out. Not the case here.
It isn't really the case that poorly designed technologies die out, necessarily. They just need to have one killer advantage. Javascript, as the only option, PHP prior to getting its act together won with its extremely low barrier to entry both in terms of learning the language and getting it running somewhere. So gradle having users doesn't convey to me that it's necessarily well-designed. I think it's "killer advantage" was that it's not xml.
I tried to say in the last sentence that I think most people who abandoned maven for Gradle mostly just hate xml, sorry if you missed the sentence saying that.
I do not work on Android apps, but I use Gradle in semi-large web app and lots of fat jar projects. Do you happen to know if there are any perf measurements that outline Gradle is slower?
Basically every Android conference has a set of talks on how to make Gradle perform in usable ways, including setting up the background daemon to use as much RAM as it can, RAM disks, SSDs.
Tricks that Maven, or the other build systems never required.
Well, in all fairness I switched from Maven to Gradle exactly due to low performance. Gradle gave my projects a boost of 3 to 7 times faster build speeds. RAM is not an issue for my setups, although I can’t recall how Maven held there against Gradle.
Buck looks quite interesting. Thanks for pointing it out!
0 - https://gradle.com/customers
(Edit: Heh, TIL rage downvotes are a thing in HN as well.)