My point was that autotools had the excuse of being written in the early 90ies, cmake doesn't.
Your experience with debugging autotools vs cmake does not match mine: cmake is not an improvement over autotools (if only because at least with autotools, there is some decent doc out there and google knows a lot about autoconf insanity). It took me hours to debug trivial issues with cmake, because you can't easily trace where variables are defined.
CMake is not "impossible to debug." In fact, it is a lot easier to debug than autotools-- partly because you end up writing so much less code. Also you don't have the three levels of "generated files generating other file generators" that you do in autotools.
For all its suckiness, I take autoconf/automake over cmake.
Well, we agree on one thing. autotools does suck.