I tried dependency substitution with a homegrown project setup (see Eclipse: detect projects that are dependencies). It is working, though I had to close the Gradle sources (of the whole distribution) first, because resolution of projects kept running forever 
As you wrote in Exciting new Buildship Features coming up the feature does recognize artifacts with markers project.name and project.group. Can you tell if you plan to recognize artifacts with different markers? Especially for different “artifactIds” because I do not like the project’s name (hence the folder name of the checked out repository) to be the artifact’s Id.
So if I have a project “projectA” with groupId “my.group” that produces a “api-1.0.jar” under “build/libs/”, then will dependency substitution recognize it when I refer to a dependency of “compile 'my.group:api:1.0”?