It’s always been this way “by design”, but we want to move away from it so the daemon isn’t killed so often. I think there are cases where we don’t propagate the ctrl+c, but that’s by luck.
If you look at what we’re doing for continuous mode in 2.5, we’re adding ctrl+d to exit the Gradle process without killing the daemon. We have a similar problem as bootRun with our Play application support (playRun), which uses the same mechanism (ctrl+d). I think we’ll eventually do something like this generically, but we need to provide an alternative way for existing build scripts to read stdin before we capture input all of the time.