Good point. I have to say I'm wary of that, recursive make is not a good idea, and the problem can't be fixed by building a better make, because the issue is that it breaks up the dependency graph and creates build problems.

Eg, if you have src/lib, and src/bin, and the src/bin project depends on the src/lib library, then in self-contained, recursively invoked makefiles (or anything else), you won't get a correct behavior when a header in the library changes.

Other make replacements have solved this by making the dependency graph independent of the file structure. Hopefully beast does this too

What do you mean? make has no particular requirements regarding the file structure. You can write a single giant Makefile covering a directory tree with thousands of source files in various directories.

I meant independent of the (make-replacement)file structure. As long as the dependency graph isn't restricted to a single build file, then most of the inherent issues with recursive make are avoided.