Personal anecdote, I stopped trying to develop for MC Forge in version 1.7 because the gradle build they switched to was unbelievably slow and difficult to use. After several days of poking it, I still couldn't understand why asking gradle for a simple list of available tasks was taking >10 seconds, and when I tried to give my workspace to a friend on another computer, I discovered I had totally I failed to get a list of coherent commands that I was 100% sure could reproduce my workspace on a new machine, because of large amounts of scattered hidden state I had failed to detect. Part of this might be poor build config design, but gradle certainly helped enable a lot of poor behavior and certainly doesn't impress me with its performance for trivial tasks.