There's something of a paradox to build tools - people like to have one in "their" language, but most languages are ill suited for it. Half of the people need something really simple. The other half need something extremely complicated. There's a mountain of edge cases, most of which people don't even notice, but which make other people's lives a misery.
For git, I felt kind of sad that "linus branding" helped it to beat out mercurial. git's UI is kind of monstrous (even linus admitted that). It's one of those rare technologies where a bad UI is branded as "you're just not smart enough to understand it".
Magit is great! I use everyday. The more useful feature for me is partial staging by simple text selection. Help so much to create better atomic commits
Would that a git for build tools would come along.
That is, something so compelling and sufficiently licensed that it quells the discussion in a jiffy so that the focus can be on getting work done.