My experience with Kotlin gradle scripts is worse than Groovy. For example, given the following valid groovy/kotlin gradle program:
dependencies {
}
What would you expect to see between the curly braces? IntelliJ IDEA which supposedly has full support for the gradle DSL both for Groovy and Kotlin offers only generic suggestions. Common function calls such "implementation()" or "testImplementation()" are not suggested. If you do use those functions, no suggestion is made for their parameters. Because Gradle's DSL is built on top of a general purpose language, it loses the benefits of a DSL (constraining the set of possible configurations and guiding the user towards valid configurations).
The key benefit of the Kotlin DSL is that in this precise example, IDEA does suggest valid stuff:
https://imgur.com/a/vFYNIU1
Kotlin DSL is miles ahead of Groovy in terms of discoverability and IDEA integration. With Groovy DSL, most of the build script is highlighted with various degrees of errors and warnings; with Kotlin DSL, if something is highlighted, it is a legitimate error, and vice versa - if no errors are detected by IDEA, then it is almost certain to work.
There were rough spots of IDEA integration a couple years ago, but now it is close to perfect, within Gradle's limits of course (due to sheer dynamic nature of it, some things are just not possible to express in a static fashion, unfortunately). The biggest obstacle to Kotlin DSL use might be that some of the plugins use various Groovy-specifc features which are hard to use from Kotlin, but thankfully most of the plugins either fix those, or are rewritten in Java or Kotlin instead.
There's a huge gap in Java build tool space for a tool that is simple and easy to learn and can cover 90% of projects' requirements. I have this feeling that we're in the "subversion" days of java build tools and the day someone introduces "git" people will wonder why we suffered with Gradle and Maven for so long. If I had time I would be looking into building this.
predating Gradle was a tool called gant. It was simple, intuitive and did 90% of what every project could want. Ironically it was Groovy based as well. But instead of the Gradle arcane magic based configuration it was literal, direct, a simple extension of Ant that came before it. I liked it much better, but someone decided they could make a business out of Gradle and gant got deprecated and here we are.
