hi, do we have a dedicated channel for IntelliJ gradle plugin's issues?

Probably as that's usually more a JetBrains support topic, no.

I'm unsure who develops the Idea gradle plugin - is it them or Gradle?

Guess from what I said 🙂

I see

There's a dedicated slack for the jetbrains platform

Which is not for getting support

Fair enough

yea I got boosted out there pretty fast

As I said, that Slack is solely for help with developing plugins for IntelliJ products, not for help with any, be they 3rd party or built-in. It is not a miserable stepchild and JetBrains does stand up for the plugin, it is a built-in feature of the IDE. If you are a paying customer, use the support contact form to get help with your problem / question, if not open an issue in YouTrack if you found a bug.

yes I'm a paying customer, and I seem to have hit a 3y old bug with no resolution and 6 duplicates: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KTIJ-20694/IDE-Gradle-import-leads-to-java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError-org-gradle-tooling-BuildException

Their whole server makes it clear that it is only for plugin development, and you are by far not the the first that is sent off for asking support questions for which that Slack is not suitable, no matter which channel. The channel you wrote to is not about the Gradle plugin in IntelliJ, but about the plugin for usage in Gradle builds to develop plugins for JetBrains IDEs. As I said, if you are a paying customer, head to the customer support form, then you get timely attention by support staff. Issues in YouTrack can need significant more time, as anyone can open them, and they don't even know which is coming from paying customer and which are not. That's why I recommended to use the support request form for paying customers if you want customer support: https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=66731

issue raised, let's see if I get more luck this time