> That said, to be honest it's still very confusing and I still don't understand how the hell Groovy works with it's looks-declarative-but-really-isn't code style.
The now default Kotlin syntax helps somewhat.
How?? It's exactly the same as the Groovy syntax in almost every way, specially the nested blocks which makes Groovy look declarative and that Kotlin inherited from Groovy.
Better IDE autocomplete.
But then again you are the Swede that for a long time ran an advanced, publicly available search engine out of your living room as a side project while working full time.
Of course you can get Gradle to work.
Also even considering the above I'd say you were a bit lucky in that you could set up everything yourself, instead of having 11 different people on 7 different teams do it for you ;-)
I've managed to make something that's actually makes Gradle seem pretty impressive, I think mostly by accident. I recently migrated Marginalia's code base to a highly modular set-up, and to my surprise Gradle actually does an extremely good job at dealing with this. Once I got it all set up, each sub module has a fairly clean gradle file that mostly just specifies dependencies and build artifacts. I can specify versions in a single file, dependency management is very straight forward and it's stupidly fast do incremental re-builds.
But to be honest it's still very confusing and I still don't understand how the hell Groovy works with it's looks-declarative-but-really-isn't code style.
Although this is the first time I think I've begun to glimpse why Gradle exists other than to torment developers with API incompatibilities upon each (mandatory) upgrade to keep it working with the newest JVM.