I have fantastically lost my patience with Gradle builds that is why.
I bet if it wasn't for Android, no one would care about Gradle, Google is basically funding its existence.
There are hardly any talks about optmizing Maven builds, with Gradle on the other hand, not only it comes regularly, there is even tooling to track down build performance issues and regular conference talks on the matter.
You can’t possibly believe that the configuration file itself takes any significant percentage of running a full build?