What GNU make substitute do you recommend?

Imagine you're free to choose a tool like GNU make for a new C++ project. What would you choose? Are any usable substitutes out there?

It shall have/be

a command line interface
"easy" to understand
easy to set up for a default c++ project
may support src/bin seperation as common for Java
may not add too much dependencies to other software/libs
platform independent (new)
features:
- build rules / templates like make but in an human readable way
- recursively crawling directories and applying the rules if there is no other "Makefile"
- configuration by exception

Note:

Nothing's wrong with GNU make. I just don't like its grammar, all the stuff that grows in the years and the silly recursive make problems. I'm using gmake for years now.

Solution

I use cmake, and I'm very glad I made the switch.

EDIT

Feature list as found in the wikipedia article:

Configuration files are CMake scripts, which use a programming language specialized to software builds

Automatic dependency analysis built-in for C, C++, Fortran and Java

Support of SWIG, Qt, via the CMake scripting language

Built-in support for many versions of Microsoft Visual Studio including versions 6, 7, 7.1, 8.0, and 9.0

Generates build files for Eclipse CDT (C/C++ Development Tools)

Detection of file content changes using traditional timestamps,

Support for parallel builds

Cross-compilation

Global view of all dependencies, using CMake to output a graphviz diagram

Support for cross-platform builds, and known to work on

Linux and other POSIX systems (including AIX, *BSD systems, HP-UX, IRIX/SGI, and Solaris)

Mac OS X

Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP, Windows Vista and MinGW/MSYS

Integrated with DART (software), CDash, CTest and CPack, a collection of tools for software testing and release

But to be honest: Just about anything is better than the gnu toolchain.