I'm with John here. And I can say this: we, the top commiters have no complaints about the tools. We will use whatever tools are available. (at least I speak for Hartmut, John, Volodya and I; but I have a strong feeling that Steven and Daniel agree too).
One should recognize here that there is a strong form of self-selection happening; the "top committers" are those individuals who have the desire/motivation/incentive to spend a substantial fraction of their professional and/or personal time refining their knowledge of the details of Boost. For someone who is a Boost consultant (several of whom appear at the top of the aforementioned list) this is clearly a worthwhile investment and, in fact, having a complex tool chain and difficult to master systems is advantageous in that it increases the potential demand for consulting work. A simpler and easier-to- understand tool chain would presumably lower barriers to entry and increase participation from individuals
A Good Craftsman Never Blames His Tools
And I think what Volodya meant is that more than anyone else, it is us who are in the position to determine if we are using the right tool or whether the tools are making us effective. And... hmmm, I think we are effective ;-)
Speaking from personal experience, I would almost certainly not have been able to persevere long enough to see Boost.Units through to completion - without Steven's deep knowledge of the Boost build system and C++ in general, my ability to define an appropriate architecture for dimensional analysis and establish expectations for its function would have been stymied by my inability to achieve a "professional" implementation. I won't speak for Steven, but I guess that it is unlikely that he would have produced that library on his own, either. The proliferation of "toy" dimensional analysis libraries (c.f. MPL library examples) attests to that. Matthias