I honestly wish I knew what was better - it's not like I've ever used a build tool I didn't hate in some way. Part of the problem with Java to me is that (IMO) maven is the only build tool that doesn't make force me to spend significant time maintaining the build as well as the code, but maven is... very much a local maximum.

I generally agree with "not that great" - Java the language I actually find fine, and to me it scratches a lot of the pragmatism that Go tries to get, with different warts in each. I try to avoid the Java framework ecosystem so I don't have to deal with beans and annotations and piles of codegen, not because I don't like the language. And Android has done much damage to the community's impression of Java.