Last time I used it which was right around when 1.3 was released I turned on debug logging while the project built so I could see what was causing the issues. It was hanging long periods of time around a task I had to make a fat jar. If I remember correctly it was having some real trouble with locks on Ivy caches... I tried clearing out the Gradle caches and that did not resolve the problem. Since that was a small project I was able to replace the build file with a POM and assembly descriptor be done with it.

If I get some more time to play around I might go back and try and collect some more info for a bug report... I have had this issue since the late Gradle betas each time I go back to using Gradle I hope the problem is resolved.