How are you finding build/packaging times with gradle + kts building a kotlin project?
Gradle can be impressively fast (i’d hate to use a gradle build without the distributed build cache feature these days, what a difference), it can be reasonably easy to identify slow parts of a build (digging through build scans isn’t too hard). When it comes to extending it, groovy is actually pretty comfortable for making little doo-dads to assemble some shell scripts from templates, or populate an h2 with some build metrics, or whatever you need, but all in all i think i’m over gradle.
The speed is hard to keep on point, requires constant babysitting in a medium or large team and the learning curve really requires a reasonable working knowledge of groovy first (or kotlin - i haven't used the kts facilities) and a lot of java developers just aren’t interested in learning properly so they hack something in which leads to band aids that get hairy easily.
Speed is fine, in the larger monorepo projects I have worked on implementing plugins using the worker architcture and paying attention to parallelism by splitting things into sub-projects appropriately always kept build time reasonable.
You are correct that the biggest problem is that many people treat it as a distraction/unimportant part of their workflow and then wonder why things go badly.
As the most senior member on most teams I am on I take it on myself to take charge of the builds, CI and other tooling to ensure this doesn't happen and all engineers are productive. Unfortunately that isn't a solution for everyone but IMO it's how it should be, you make yourself a 10x engineer by magnifying the performance of your other team members.
Gradle can be impressively fast (i’d hate to use a gradle build without the distributed build cache feature these days, what a difference), it can be reasonably easy to identify slow parts of a build (digging through build scans isn’t too hard). When it comes to extending it, groovy is actually pretty comfortable for making little doo-dads to assemble some shell scripts from templates, or populate an h2 with some build metrics, or whatever you need, but all in all i think i’m over gradle.
The speed is hard to keep on point, requires constant babysitting in a medium or large team and the learning curve really requires a reasonable working knowledge of groovy first (or kotlin - i haven't used the kts facilities) and a lot of java developers just aren’t interested in learning properly so they hack something in which leads to band aids that get hairy easily.