Simple and easy are not mutually exclusive, and simple software is not automatically good software. Other criteria, ease of use, documentation, also matter, especially for a build tool intended to be used by a whole community.

At the moment deps feels more of a 'make your own build tool' kit. Simple, sure, but not easy to use: you need to tell it how to build jars or run tests, which is IMO essential functionality of a build tool.

I don't want to tell my build tool how to achieve these essential things, and risk ending up with a mess of projects that all use different aliases to run different tests runners and different jar building plugins. Build tooling is one place where convention over configuration matters to me, and why I still prefer leiningen.

I'm hoping deps and tools.build will evolve from a 'make your own build tool kit' to a build tool that exposes the kit it was built on, so that most projects don't require anything custom, and be flexible enoug so that one special project can leverage the 'simple orthogonal parts' in the kit.

I see tools.build as a step forwards, but it's not there yet IMO, the user still needs to configure a bunch of stuff to get essential functionality.

I hope the core team will make a build tool on top of the 'make your own build tool kit' that is deps and tools.build, that comes with good defaults and essential features for the common projects, while exposing the 'simple orthogonal parts' in the kit so these can be used for complex projects.