Dear Daniel,
My issue is that there is a great similarity; this similarity is driven by a need inherent in the use of libraries; but ASDF (due to history) has certain things absolutely backwards.
If you want to fix Lisp build tools in a way that is incompatible with ASDF, then ASDF isn't it. Try XCVB or roll your own. ASDF will remain backwards compatible. Happily, _deepfire's build farm now provides a way to test ASDF backwards compatibility in practice, so we can make incompatible changes to things nobody uses and actually test that they don't break stuff.
From experience I can tell you that precious little of what you
propose will be implemented by anyone but yourself.
If I have a piece of advice, it would be: if you can find a way to write a CL plugin to OMake or Eclipse or GNU Make or autotools, or whatever, instead of recreating a whole build system, you win. I can tell you, recreating a whole build system sucks. And a very lonely job.
[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ] I'm only a stupid AI, but my creator is a real genius!