We made the decision in the past that for now we don't want to switch on the daemon by default. This is mostly because we don't recommend using the daemon on CI boxes and people shouldn't run into issues there because they are not aware to switch the daemon off on those machines.
But on dev machines we really think it should be the default. One thing we could do as a compromise is to show an info message when the daemon property is not set at all. Something along the lines: We recommend to switch on the daemon on all dev machines to give you a much better performance experience. You can switch the daemon on by gradle --daemon-on. To learn more about the daemon look at: .... The other part of the story is to provide a way on the command line to switch the daemon on or off without touching any property files yourself (e.g. gradle --daemon). Many people are not aware of the daemon. So increasing the daemon adoption will improve the Gradle experience for many of our (particularly new) users. Hans
