How on earth did ant become the build tool for java?

I got pretty sick of netbeans taking forever to build a very simple JavaFX app on my apparently now-too-slow (too-little-memoried) dual-core laptop, and so looked into why it was taking so long by creating a Makefile.

I wasn't expecting this ...

[notzed@unknown001fe11d1e42 MapViewer]$ time ant clean jar

... many pages of completely illegible and altogether
    meaningless-to-human-or-computer output ...

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 22 seconds

real    0m22.527s
user    0m32.211s
sys     0m1.919s
[notzed@unknown001fe11d1e42 MapViewer]$ make clean all

... a succinct if not particularly human-friendly list
    of the specific commands executed ...

real    0m1.563s
user    0m1.678s
sys     0m0.349s
[notzed@unknown001fe11d1e42 MapViewer]$ 

What? What? Huh?

Oh, so it seems 'ant clean' cleans all related projects as well so it's rebuilding many more files needlessly. I thought one of the main points of having multiple sub-projects is to avoid this kind of thing ... but yeah, "whatever", ... in the parlance of our time.

So what about just changing one file ...

[notzed@unknown001fe11d1e42 MapViewer]$ touch src/mapviewer/MapViewer.java 
[notzed@unknown001fe11d1e42 MapViewer]$ time ant jar

.. pages of crap again ...

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 7 seconds

real    0m8.344s
user    0m9.161s
sys     0m1.038s
[notzed@unknown001fe11d1e42 MapViewer]$

Even what amounts to a simple batch script which just does everything from scratch is an order of magnitude faster than using ant - which only compiled one file. With JavaFX (as well as android), netbeans just keeps forgeting to pick up changes so I almost always have to use shift-f11 (complete clean and rebuild) every time I run whatever i'm working on otherwise I get either the old code or runtime failure.

I'm using javafxpackager to create the final jar, and the makefile is only 30 lines long, and you know, at least a bit readable.

I hate to think of the days I alone waste every year because of this completely incompetent and utterly shit tool.

Oh my god, it's full of boggles.