Ant wasn't bad, it was a big step up from using Make for Java builds.
Maven wasn't bad either. It tried to enforce convention over configuration, while also introducing a native dependency management mechanism.
Gradle was/is bad and serves no real purpose.
My main gripe is that it changed so quickly. All my notes quickly became useless. And it was slow. Gradle daemon promised to help. And it did help. (And became even more of a resource hog) But it was still bad. Show me the build tool - I'll show you the bad.