I don't really get the hype about Gradle.

For those of us without XML phobia, it doesn't offer any benefit and is slow as molasses.

You can speed it up somewhat by tweaking ~/.gradle/gradle.properties and adding org.gradle.daemon=true and org.gradle.parallel=true. That way at least it doesn't have to re-read all the build files each time and will run some parts in parallel.

The benefit wrt the old Ant-based build is the way it lets you specify 3rd party dependencies. Being able to just add in say Timber, ButterKnife and Guava with a few lines of config, rather than downloading the jars, faffing with paths, making sure the pre-processing bits are in place, etc, is really a big benefit. Maybe Maven would have been a more sensible choice, since Gradle/Groovy seems pretty niche and not really used that much outside Android.

> ... since Gradle/Groovy seems pretty niche and not really used that much outside Android.

This is the only reason I am now forced to deal with it.

On our enterprise Java projects it is all about Ant and Maven.