It might be accurate to say that we're doing the wrong things but iterating fast. That's why we have this tumult of tools. Software is definitely not mature enough to just standardise on a few of them.

I feel confident in saying that because the thought of permanently standardising on any existing build or configuration management tool fills me with horror. In the JVM world, ant is inadequate, Maven is diabolical, Gradle is a huge step forward but has many warts and one or two fundamental mistakes, and sbt is just vile. Gradle is good enough to be getting on with, but i'm looking forward to the next step.

Provided, that is, that the next step is taken after learning from previous steps. Sometimes that happens - Ansible and Salt are clearly attemps to improve on the overcomplexity of Puppet and Chef. Sometimes it doesn't - i'm not sure that Gulp or Leiningen do anything to help.