Otherwise we would keep using only Maven for Java projects.
Slower builds and higher hardware requirements for daemon and build cache are not worth it.
False
If it wasn't forced upon us for Android dev no one at my employer would even bother to learn what is Gradle.
The opinion is that it is the last spot keeping Groovy alive.
(They may have good reasons, but anything that prolongs the lifespan of Groovy is a bad thing.)
We refer to that in the corporate world as "death by committee".
You can solve the problem with a GitHub repository and an intern trawling StackOverflow and IRC logs. Choosing not do that sends a signal.
Waiting for Google to "accomplish it together" (aka sometime before the heat death of the universe) is a good way to get replaced.
My Android projects are mostly private stuff but I don't remember any project that would require any kind of custom build. There is whole plethora of tools. My own calculators for various stuff, app to communicate with my family, apps to manage my electronics (bluetooth, wifi, cloud), apps to manage stuff in my Drive. My changes are mostly adding dependencies.
That basic boilerplate is no longer enough and tricks change with each release.
Focus on Android Studio because that's the only place people really use Gradle because they are forced to do so.
You need to create a LOT of Android Studio sample projects, and they need to be kept up to date for the various versions of Android Studio. If you did nothing but create "Hello World" in a zillion various flavors (Java, Kotlin, Scala, NDK, NDK with static library on different architectures, etc.) for people, that would be huge.
My specific beef is with NDK projects. Pulling in static libraries and compiling them with the NDK is a mix of magical keywords that sometimes materialize from some kind stranger via chat--generally because Gradle has to shove those keywords to something like CMake--which ALSO has an enormous learning curve.