FWIW, my mileage definitely varied: autotools--which is quite easy if you bother to learn how it works and is then almost infinitely flexible--has pretty much never failed me (I think there was one incident for a while related to building stuff for iOS? regardless this was fixed long ago), but I have had to file and participate in a number of bugs on cargo, most of which are still open :/, and I haven't even developed anything in Rust myself yet... I've merely tried to compile and use stuff other people wrote and run into myriad ridiculous problems.