what usually takes 2 minutes max now takes ages! Welcome to Gradle ...

Don't blame the technology, blame the implementor. Most usual gradle problem I encounter is when it's migrated from something else hoping gradle solves it, but usually it's just convoluted builds doing way too much. Try to make builds smaller with several jars in some artifact repository depending on each other, rather than rebuilding everything each time. There's very rare situations where that is a real necessity.
Oh and gradle daemon..it is controversial, but does pay the benefits when it works.
Only thing I hate and love abut gradle is "I don't care" backward incompatible changes on minor version bumps.

@Orang good point though I usually don't face this problem but for some unknown reason gradle was re-downloading dependencies (or some of them)
because after it finished (took about 30 minutes) each build took barely 1 minute. I'm guessing this is the only explanation, even a full clean of the project took max 5 mins.