As the title implies, I’m trying to get the new starter working. I don’t use Maven because I hate it. So I always have to convert the Maven starter to Gradle. This takes hours just to work out the dependencies that seem to always be missing. The new starter is using Spring Data which uses Hibernate and the starter does not include a hibernate config. So it does not work out of the box. I wish Vaadin would create a Gradle version of the starter. Does Maven do some magic thing that allows a “no hibernate config” to work?
Then I recommend to use Spring Initializr
The baseline you get from there unfortunately does not have any code to start with, just the gradle.build, so you need to start construct the source code folders and theme folders first. But maybe this is less hazle for you than converting pom.xml → gradle.build.
Btw, I think like gradle equally much than you like maven, but hey it is good that world has options 
I already know how to create a Vaadin project but doing it from scratch is a big hassle. You have to setup a lot of things. I thought the idea of the starter was to eliminate the need to start from an empty folder. If Vaadin wants to show off their product, the starter is a good idea. But it has to work out of the box or it looks bad.
Anyway, the problem with the starter is that there is no mention that you need to setup some things for it work, like a data source. The web page makes it look simpler than it actually is.
There’s always going to be difference of opinions on things like Maven vs. Gradle. I just think Maven is too complicated for what it does and it has a high failure rate, and takes too long to setup.
Then I would recommend to initialize the Gradle project using Spring Initialzr and then copy paste the start.vaadin.com generated project Java and frontend sources there. Just use the same package base name in both.
My feeling about Gradle is exactly the same. But fundamentally I think the absolute truth is just about learning curve. I.e. if you happen to know the details and behavior of the either one better than the other, it is the actually the thing that guides the preference. Technically neither is inferior or more complex than the other. It is just what we perceive against our previous learning.
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You can also find a simpler starter using gradle on this starters page.
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I forgot about that. Thank you. Still, my OP was a suggestion for enhancing the main starter because it seemed that Vaadin was trying to showcase features, which was my reason for using the starter.
Update: I got it working with manual tweeks. Unfortunately the new copilot feature doesn’t work with eclipse, ugh. That was what I wanted to test.