For me, it's especially bad with the indirection, and the 3-dimensional cube of settings (I can never remember after all these years which one I want to set, the scope or the configuration or the task...). The complete mystery of how plugins affect the final build configuration.

I even went to a lot of effort to master SBT. I've read through the official docs numerous times, and Josh Suereth's Book https://www.manning.com/books/sbt-in-action, and I still feel like I don't grasp it very well. I'm just not smart enough for SBT.

I think a lot of it is probably just that sbt feels as deep as learning entire programming languages sometimes and that is not something I want in a build tool.