Whoah! Hold on, now. autotools (and CMake) exists for a reason. They, in many cases make your life easier than maintaining makefiles. I do think make is much easier to work with (with some warts) than autotools, and it's certainly more comprehensible, since it's so much smaller and contains far fewer bits of magic. But, to just throw out everything autotools were designed to deal with doesn't make sense.

Sure, if your build is simple, make works fine. But, the projects I've worked on where autotools was used, simply using make would have been a horrible experience. And, in most cases, the projects started out using make by itself and then moved to using autotools when the number of platform specific makefiles became too big to maintain.