I know nothing about Android development with Gradle (or Android development in general, for that matter). I feel that is where a lot of negativity in this thread comes from. But then it's not per-se Gradle who is to blame; it's this specific use case of Gradle with Android which apparently is giving people a poor experience (e.g. lacking documentation).
> You are probably doing a bit simpler stuff, if that basic tutorial suffices you.
I've written a couple Gradle plugins, one of them was to build and test programs in our custom DSL. This exposed me to all facets of Gradle, because whatever Gradle offers to compile Java, Kotlin, ... you will most likely use for another language as well. I could not have written these plugins without the Gradle documentation. But again, it's totally unrelated to Android development.
> You are probably doing a bit simpler stuff, if that basic tutorial suffices you.
I've written a couple Gradle plugins, one of them was to build and test programs in our custom DSL. This exposed me to all facets of Gradle, because whatever Gradle offers to compile Java, Kotlin, ... you will most likely use for another language as well. I could not have written these plugins without the Gradle documentation. But again, it's totally unrelated to Android development.