To compare gradle to a PHP space equivalent, composer is most likely to pop up, and working with both (for different projects and reasons) there are a few features both could borrow from each other:
One such feature that composer has that I think gradle could use is:
‘self-update’
it updates the installation directory (system wide in that case) to the latest version with a simple cmd command.
I see no reason why this wouldn’t benefit gradle.
it may be necessary to build in a
‘self-update rollback’
command to allow a quick rollback incase of unknown issues with backwards compatibility.
Even better if it could warn about issues detected with build.files and breaking changes.