> That said, I know what you mean. I've had to seek out a number of different versions of Autotools just to get some things to build. But that is because a lot of projects and/or distro packaging blatantly uses Autotools differently than it's was designed to be used. I don't think Autotools should be blamed for this.

yes, it absolutely should be. If a tool is misused, it's generally because it's hard to use correctly. In contrast, if I see a repo with a CMakeLists.txt I know that it's going to be a simple cmake && make.