@Shawn First time posting on Medium - it ate the code snippet.
No, Kobalt is more or less corrected version of Gradle, which I do have high respect for, but it's not the same thing. It's got plugins and a full system built around it, with tasks and more. I'm thinking about the possibility of using Kotlin scripts directly - no built-in task system, no plugins. Just function declarations, which take the place of tasks. You can import other libraries to make things more convenient - like a library for managing Maven dependencies, a library for running the Kotlin compiler, etc. But unlike Kobalt, this would be very direct - when running 'tasks', you'd just be running the script and adding a final line to tell it which function to call.