Gradle's approach is commendable, but it's too complicated and they built Gradle on top of Groovy. Groovy is not a good language (and it's also not a good implementation of that not good language).

It's good enough for me. It's unlikely to be "replaced" by the new hotness because it was created way before the JVM language craze where there were dozens of competing JVM languages. Sure that means it has warts but at least I don't have to learn a dozen sets of different warts.