Not only that, but every time I'm up against a problem building software that uses something else, it's like, "oh great now I have to figure out what their secret badly-documented variable names are and how to configure their XML/JSON/YAML/whatever"

It's a pleasure when autotools is used because in generally I know it's going to be nothing much more than

> --with-stuff/--without-stuff

and

> --prefix=$HOME/.local

and when it's not, at least I know I can just grep the shell script and figure it out pretty quickly without having to learn a whole new programming language.