I'm a sw engineer programming Java since 1996. I started using Maven when it first came out as the declarative build language hooked me, and became the local Maven expert. I've watched it grow with pride, and sometimes in anger. I still believe a declarative build language is best, but it won't be in XML. I suspect it will eventually be in something like OWL, whatever comes along after OWL that fixes its issues.

So as of a few years ago I too moved on to Gradle and have loved it.

But...

Language based build systems offer more expressiveness, but that is also more rope to hang yourself with if you get someone that doesn't know Gradle well doing tinkering with your build. For example we had someone add a custom checkstyle report to an Android project using Gradle. After their edits it stopped working because of the way the Android plugin was designed, bringing the build down for several hours. I came in, rewrote the Gradle build file to workaround the issue and it worked. Then I documented to the person why it hadn't worked and what I did to fix it.

As with the adoption of anything that gives you more rope to hang yourself with, it's a necessary piece of Gradle adoption to document your practices and train your team well.