I hear this sort of argument all the time (build systems, templating engines, config files, etc) and I'm not sure I agree with it anymore. Invariably people start adding features and you wnd up with horrible warty languages full of corner cases like make or shell.
Yeah, limitations like these are often just a red rag to hackers that naturally love the challenge of overcoming apparent limitations with ornate workarounds. See the gmsl library mentioned in the current top post for example, which I read a bit of while trying to get a handle on the Android NDK's build system; respect to jgrahamc for its cleverness but if you don't like Make in the first place, you're inclined to feel that more of it is bad and not good.
