> For a serious project of any scope, it's rare to use bare makefiles, though. recursive make, autotools/m4, cmake, etc all rear their beautiful/ugly heads soon enough.
If I didn't have to provide the option to build under Xcode or VS, I wouldn't have to live in the hell that is Cmake.
cmake has improved so much since 3.0 that it's almost unrecognizable. Though much of the cruft remains, thanks to backwards compatibility, and anything involving list or string operations is still absolute hell, I dare say it's actually pleasant to use, at least compared to 2.8.whatever-shipped-with-ubuntu-precise.
Personally, I'm glad we use cmake at work simply because we have a diversity of preferred build tools: some people like to work in XCode or Eclipse, others like to use a text editor and make, others like to use a text editor and ninja. While we all suffer a bit with cmake, we all benefit from its position as a "metabuild" tool.
If I didn't have to provide the option to build under Xcode or VS, I wouldn't have to live in the hell that is Cmake.
I'd just use make.