Saying Gradle is the minimum possible for a build tool because it generates a dependency graph is a bit of a stretch. Gradle is essentially a custom groovy/kotlin build script dsl in addition to a dependency manager. I just want the latter; leave the former to existing tools. Maven and plug-ins can do the same without learning a new (and brittle) dsl. Worst case in maven you have to write your own plugin, but then you just use their documented plug-in API (import org.apache.maven.plugin) like any other JVM project.