Replace gradle in standard build process

[terabyte]

What's the deal with Gradle?

Pros:

• it "just works"
• it can run our unit tests for us
• it reliably builds jars from java source code
• most devs understand how it works and thus the build.gradle is transparent

Cons:

• slow (have to disable gradle daemon for correctness, etc)
• needlessly complex
• large binary dependency

We've tried to replace gradle with a PoC shell script to invoke javac on the packages, it was surprisingly difficult, and that isn't even taking into account the shenanigans that would be necessary to run tests.

[terabyte]

Alternative idea: replace with bazel or something else?