That's interesting because I find it to be one of the most ergonomic build tools I've ever worked with. It sits somewhere between make and autotools in terms of what it does and I find it far easier to use than either.
You've probably learned it more thoroughly than I have, or maybe we have different tastes. I find it just impossible to get into, it all rubs me the wrong way. It is so overcomplicated, and unlispy in the way that FORMAT and LOOP are unlispy, only much worse. I actually like FORMAT and LOOP but they're foreign implants amid the lispiness and that's how ASDF feels as well.
it's fukamachi-ware, guy has a bunch of own solutions in the web development space, i suspect driven by his specific needs. they are, fwiw, not as idiosyncratic as some of the artisanal common lisp one-man solutions can be, but they are distinctly and recognizably their own thing
I use his web stack in some of my projects. His stuff is pretty great, it's just that he basically doesn't write any documentation at all, and the small scraps of documentation he does write assume that you're intimately familiar with the details of his packages. So you need to figure a lot out on your own by digging through source code, which is very irritating when you're trying to be productive.
