I have exactly the opposite experience: I do not want to write a program to compile my program.
Having used both scons and waf, and also having used make, cmake and cargo, I would take any of the last three over scons or waf in a heartbeat. I think cargo is far and away the nicest to use because there is very little to actually do to build your program. Using waf or scons was always an exercise of 'I added a header file, so now I need to figure out the scons/waf API in order to tell it what to do with it'.
Having used both scons and waf, and also having used make, cmake and cargo, I would take any of the last three over scons or waf in a heartbeat. I think cargo is far and away the nicest to use because there is very little to actually do to build your program. Using waf or scons was always an exercise of 'I added a header file, so now I need to figure out the scons/waf API in order to tell it what to do with it'.