I have to agree honestly. I've tried many of the build systems out there, and I have settled on tup[1] as being one of the greatest creations ever. The Tupfiles are incredibly simple, the execution time is bloody fast, and it is more capable of creating easily-reproducible builds than anything else I've seen so far. I'd recommend you give it a look if you're not familiar with it.

[1] http://gittup.org/tup/