Why is Gradle so bad?

There's plenty of posts on the problems of Gradle [1][2 etc] - it's undiscoverable, undebuggable, and the documentation tells you everything except how to actually solve your problem. Why is it still the standard JVM build tool? Kotlin is a wonderful high-level server language, I just can't get past how hard it is to set up - and no, RTFM hasn't helped me in the slightest.

Trying to understand if there's room/need for improvement here, not start a flame war. I've tried Maven once upon a time and that had its own problems.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35709521 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801986