I think CMake is quite established. I don't like these kind of holy wars (I like vim too :-)) but to get stuff done. ROS lets me do that.

I've seen several times that companies write their message passing stuff on top of ZeroMQ, mttq and what-have-you, while they could have spent all that time doing something novel as well. At the cost of using less than perfect tools made by someone else that a lot of people are also using.