>I'd love to see a way to build a Flutter app without Gradle.
You generally don't need to touch gradle at all with flutter. Is your issue about having to install gradle onto your machine, even if you don't use it directly?
>I used to work on it, or at least tried to before giving up in frustration.
Out of interest, what blockers did you encounter using Flutter? For me it was much better than native android in terms of development, but it could depend on the usecase.
You generally don't need to touch gradle at all with flutter. Is your issue about having to install gradle onto your machine, even if you don't use it directly?