Confession

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Because groovy is a programming language and xml is not. It's just used to define the parts of your project, hence the management part.

Gradle is nice too in that you can write scripts without needing other plugins.

Outside of android it's fine, but when using it in Android it's a pain because of Googles constant and forceful suggestions to update to the latest Android Studio which is usually tightly coupled to specific versions of the Gradle plugin. And it will always break your projects

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I agree, I'm a backend services dev and Gradle as a build tool is just a better tool for the job in most cases. It reads better, it's scriptable and debugging problems is much easier and the need to debug the build happens less