sbt isn't very good for copy&paste build masters, which was pretty much all of us who had to setup Ant and Maven projects. It demands a certain amount of investment in learning its core concepts, but OMIGOD it's sooooo good once you know what you're doing. I've extracted so much common setup to hierarchies of plugins that I can setup our company's most common usecases for new projects in 3 or so lines of code.