anyone seen gradle get stuck like this no matter what you do? i tried updating it and clearing the daemons and rebooting and deleteing caches and all that. it does this for every operation, even clean

Just for the future if you see something similar again. Those debug messages are nothing special, just normal regular work of a daemon that is alive. It is nothing unusual and not a sign of in any relation to a hang. Don't get me wrong, two hours forty minutes evaluating settings is of course not normal and I didn't see something like that before. Just the debug messages you showed are irrelevant.