CMake generates Makefiles and it really is only good for building software while Make can be used for any number of complex tasks. I agree that if you need a build system use CMake it will make your life easy.
Okay, I know next to nothing about CMake. All I know is that it is extremely frustrating when I get the source to a project that uses CMake and then have to modify the CFLAGS or figure out why it can't find some include file. Of course, the same applies to makefiles generated by automake.
Thats is the worse idea ever, hand written make files are extremly prone to failure, moreso then CMake files. There is a way to verify that you have all your dependencies and everything is discovered rather then hard coded, but some people really like to hard code things ( CMake and make both let you do this )
The thing CMake gives you is that it will _automatically_ handle almost everything involved with creating correct make files if you tell it to. Why write the same code to discover dependencies and to have external build directories and staging directories when we can do it once and have a computer write it out for us. I see it this way Make files are great and reduce you typing at the computer by a factor of 1000. CMake is also great and reduces your typing over make by a factor of 10 to 20. Things like Go or SBT/Maven are even better and they reduce typing to almost nothing at all ( SBT doesn't require any typing to build most standalone programs )
I take it you've never used or read any of the Find.cmake files, or tried to figure out which variables you need to set in all the spaghetti. Is it _LIBRARIES or *_LIBRARY_DIR? Is the comment at the top related to reality? The awful homegrown language makes it all worse.
CMake honours the CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS environment variables, but only on the initial generation of CMakeCache.txt (first call to cmake in a new build directory). You can also edit them later using the GUI (but only by enabling advanced options) or by editing CMakeCache.txt.
