I've never seen gradle be faster than Maven. I have no idea what purose its daemon serves or its promise to "parallelize workloads". Which workloads? Its purpose is to build the project, fast. It spends about a magnitude of time more just trying to start up, even with daemon running.

There seems to be some disagreement to your statement. Can you provide some concrete examples?

Has never been the case in my many years of using it. Hundreds of MB permanent RAM usage for the daemon (which it wouldn’t require if it was properly designed), everything taking well above 10s. None of this has ever been an issue with Maven.

You can disable the daemon in gradle if you don’t want it.