Never had any trouble with it myself, and it definitely makes my life as a module-builder easier...

I'm guessing that you don't work in a non-*nix environment.

When it is easier to build a module manually than it is to use the configuration utility; and so very hard to work out how to modify the configuration to do what you can do manually; the config utility is badly broken.

(And the maintainer of ExtUtils::MakeMaker recommends using Module::Build at this point...)

I know. And when M::B was first started, I supported it. EU::MM is a mess. But the lessons weren't learnt, and the former is now more complex and more fragile than the latter.