I personally never had big problems with auto tools on
Windows.
I guess you have a reasonably quick machine. Looking the results coming line by line from ./configure has been killing me, especially when I know many of them are *not* needed.
Even not fully understanding them, I was always able to tweak them such that to obtain what I needed. So, I feel at home with the autoconf thing and am somewhat scared to change.
But changing autoconf now and then is not fun either.
Nevertheless I will gladly help to tune any new environment which may help simplifying maintainance.
It should be easy, if only you can read Python.
In any case, I acknowledge your enthusiam and initiative. The configure.py thing, for example, is a big step forward at least on Windows (not even taking into account the auto-view work).
I am glad to hear that. (Few people can rebuke praises, I am not one of them. :-) Bo
