To make it worse, every Gradle project I've come across has different solutions for the same common tasks. With Maven it's more-or-less standardised, because custom plugins are rare (I've come across just one in 20 years, and I wrote it for a special purpose). Embedded Ant was more common, but thankfully rare now. Everyone just uses the same handful of plugins in my experience.

Agree that Groovy is awesome.... as a compliment to Java. I'd learn to dislike it quickly though if I had to write an entire project with it.