Lead: 'Use Gradle'
Me: 'Going with Maven'
Lead 'Why?!'
Me: 'I am not a masochist.'

*quietly succeeds in gradle*

SSDD.
srsly. Ant. Gradle. Groovy. Maven xml hell.

It is all bad.

Gradle is better than Maven in my experience. There's rarely an excuse for XML.

All my Java (+microservices) projects that used maven had me concentrated on just the programming logic, design patterns, business functionalities and architecture while developing applications without having to worry about multi-module build, but all those that used Gradle was such a pain in the a**.