By reading your response, Mike, and by reading Doug's earlier comments, I would say it all comes down to 'if it is not part of the June release of Mars, the project has to wait another year'. And probably no one (me included) would like to wait another year for Gradle support. As I said, I like and I trust the Buildship development team.
I was trying to drive the discussion with my first mail more in a direction where we think about alternatives, because I believe that (a) the risk is too high for a new project with a new codebase to join the Simultaneous Release that late in the development process, and (b) we need to find new ways of enabling them (and maybe other projects in the future) to be part of the Simultaneous Release independent from "the" release in June.
In my opinion, there are many possibilities that could be discussed as an alternative, e.g. joining with SR1, or changing the release cycle to 6 months, or splitting the release into two parts, a 'stable' stream and an 'experimental' stream for early adopters, or... there are many possibilities and to me they are all worth of discussing them. Right now they haven't been discussed yet, and I think they could help to mitigate dramatically the risk of not having Gradle support for another year.
Maybe we can use this an opportunity to revisit our ideas of changing the Simultaneous Release and use Buildship as an example, but regarding the release in June I still believe that it is too late.
Thanks,
Markus