Why isn't it fast out of the box? Why does the simple "provide a list of deps, provide a list of paths, build" take so darn long? Because Gradle is a great tool or something?

Don't forget that it's also already at version 8, where each change is mostly incompatible, bizarre and inexplicable breakages between versions, often due to meaningless option renames. Imagine if they spent all that effort on actually making it a great tool.