I remember when I was able to make the switch from Eclipse to the first beta of Android Studio.
This was night and day as well !
Sadly, I feel that the experience has degraded a LOT since then.
IntelliJ did not technically get worse, the typical Android build just grew in complexity way faster than IntelliJ optimizations could follow.
Same thing with Gradle actually. It has been getting significantly faster. But if during the 6 months you spent in order to speed up gradle by 30 % the typical build complexity has increased by 50%; sadly it means that you are losing.
This was night and day as well !
Sadly, I feel that the experience has degraded a LOT since then.
IntelliJ did not technically get worse, the typical Android build just grew in complexity way faster than IntelliJ optimizations could follow.
Same thing with Gradle actually. It has been getting significantly faster. But if during the 6 months you spent in order to speed up gradle by 30 % the typical build complexity has increased by 50%; sadly it means that you are losing.