Software build has essential complexity. Dealing with peculiarities in config syntax is a mere drop in the vast lake of unhappiness wept from having to deal with build at all. It's the tools that are salient, so folks may perceive that it's the tools at fault and must be reworked, but it isn't really: complexity in build tools is an emergent property of the domain, and any sufficiently developed reinvention will asymptotically correspond to makefiles.