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In what regards do you think this has anything to do with Gradle, besides you using it as build tool? What your said so far does not sound like this is in any way Gradle related. You should probably ask in some protobuf community.

you have a fair point I assumed it was a gradle quirk after attempting other build tools/languages and i thought one person coming across might have seen the same thing. i'll try a protobuf community instead and post the answer in this thread if i find anything