IMO Gradle has made huge improvements the past couple years (when I first started using it a few years ago it was incredibly unstable) but if you are a semi-power user of Maven I think you're going to find yourself frustrated using gradle still for a couple reasons (I've looked into this for my work recently, moving away from Ivy). Note I haven't extensively used Gradle, this is just from research:

- Intellij has incredible Maven support, and by this point almost all the bugs have been worked out. Gradle support is improving, but our company has dozens of modules, a mix of Java / Clojure source code, and depends heavily on Intellij automatic source linking working correctly, dependency propagation working 100% successfully, etc, and it's really easy for small bugs to become blockers. Last I checked there were still a number of pretty frustrating bugs related to this

- The Jenkins maven plugin is great, and the Gradle one is mediocre. For example, it does not even handle automatic triggering of downstream builds (this is absolutely critical for us https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-19941)

- Gradle pretty decent plugin support by now, but is not yet as exhaustive as what you'll find with Maven (there's a maven plugin for basically everything now)

- This may have been resolved, but I had issues configuring getting Gradle to update snapshot dependencies, which was really important to us.

In the end I decided to migrate to Maven to avoid these headaches. I think I will try to use Gradle for personal projects, but I don't feel comfortable migrating our company stack there yet.

Really appreciate the insight, this is what I have found as well. Especially using intellij, it's still hard to beat. I'm always on the look out to use new stuff, but I'd rather wait a bit..

If I go hybrid JVM, I will likely just use SBT instead.. I think I'll keep an eye on gradle and see if it matures though.

One of the reasons I still use maven is like what you mentioned: the tooling, I don't find myself using xml most of the time (despite knowing it like the back of my hand anyways)

I like Gradle a lot. The build scripts are easy to read, and it's really easy to write nice plugins.

That said, my Scala-using colleagues are unanimously agreed that SBT is the way to build Scala projects. I suspect that some of that is purely about being fashionable, but there are certainly a few things you need to do with Scala (like handling the Scala version as part of artifact coordinates) that SBT does naturally that Gradle doesn't.