The dependency on gradle is painful about il-repack

[thefiddler]

I think you only need gradle for a build server. When building manually, just open ILRepack.sln and go with that.

At least that's what I did and it appeared to worked fine... (I don't even have java installed)

[hazzik]

I dont like this as well

[gluck]

You don't have to use gradle to build the project, MSBuild/VS works just fine.
Gradle build allows automation of release tasks, version update, nuget package(s) build & upload, I wouldn't even dare do all that with MSBuild (although it's certainly feasible).
FAKE (F#) could be an alternative that don't require people to use java, if one wants to contribute an alternate build using it.

[thefiddler]

Indeed, handling these tasks with msbuild is painful. It's doable (I've done this for OpenTK), but I would really recommend against it. It's just not worth the effort.