Every time gradle build breaks, and I have to waste 2 days brute forcing solution out of it.

I know what you mean, I recently chose Gradle over Maven for a new project because it seemed the direction the industry was heading (mainly thanks to things like Android) - however, it's significantly more complex and nonobvious, and being based on Groovy its IDE support is poor.

Maven has the abortion that is its XML-based configuration but at least its been around for a while, is well understood, has plugins for almost anything you can think of and is quite well-defined so has good IDE integrations.

I'm not sure which one i'll choose for my next project (and in fact am considering migrating back to Maven on the current project)