Maven didn't became really adopted until 2.0 came out, and, to me at least, Gradle gained traction extremely fast after Maven was adopted (along with sbt for scala and others). I think Maven laid out the foundation for the adoption of gradle.

But yes, it's a lot farther apart then Grunt vs Gulp. I was more trying to show that build systems change even for very stable languages/ecoSystems (relatively speaking).

In regards to problem solved - it's an interesting thought, I haven't done a lot of ui outside of web, I wonder if other people can shed some light on churn regarding ui frameworks on desktop (or even flash/silverlight/unity etc...)