What really irritates me about gradle is that they have significant API churn but there's still five ways to do everything.

I will never pass up an opportunity to heap scorn on Gradle. I agree with everything said so far, except I would argue Ant was easier to use.

Every single Gradle build system I have encountered in the wilds of GitHub has been broken on Fedora. I eventually realised it works if I run it in an Ubuntu container (using "toolbox"). So it's only portable if you bundle up the OS with your build system.

Now it should be portable. It's written in a JVM language and every Gradle project I have seen commits a copy of the Gradle JAR to its GitHub repo, which gives me those arbitrary code execution heebie-jeebies.