The syntax has improved slightly in recent releases with the target family of commands. You just have to know what legacy parts to avoid which is itself a burden. Still it beats digging into the bowels of autotools.

I do fantasize about a new Cmake frontend implemented with Tcl scripting. That would be far more consistent and flexible and you can disable much of the language by default to minimize footbullets then allow commands to be reenabled for times they're needed.