Comment by vips7L

Gradle files are less verbose than the equivalent Maven pom.xml but Gradle tends to have other issues like: complex builds that are hard to maintain, not running on the latest JVM version without some wait time, and constantly breaking because Gradle makes breaking changes every release. I'm hoping the declarative Gradle experiment [0] helps with this.

Additionally if XML isn't your thing Maven is making a push for other formats in Maven 4 like HOCON [1].

[0] https://blog.gradle.org/declarative-gradle-first-eap [1] https://github.com/apache/maven-hocon-extension