The whole article could be written about moving to maven. I still have no idea about how to do even trivial modifications to maven builds without googling them.
Fwiw, the need to learn groovy is a bit of a red herring because it doesn't help that much: I know groovy very well but I still find gradle confusing and have to google everything. My favourite build system of all time was gant, also based on groovy but a simple wrapper for ant. It had zero magic, was just a systematic wrapping of the ant API which itself was just a bunch of well documented useful build utilities. I found it very easy to use. The contrast between two build systems both based on the same dynamic language was very stark to me.
Fwiw, the need to learn groovy is a bit of a red herring because it doesn't help that much: I know groovy very well but I still find gradle confusing and have to google everything. My favourite build system of all time was gant, also based on groovy but a simple wrapper for ant. It had zero magic, was just a systematic wrapping of the ant API which itself was just a bunch of well documented useful build utilities. I found it very easy to use. The contrast between two build systems both based on the same dynamic language was very stark to me.