I totally agree with that. We often had the situation that we just want to produce a single file to be published and either have to add task dependencies or implement AbstractArchiveTask with all the boilerplate that we don't need.

UPDATE: After some research right now (because a colleague needed it,too) I now found org.gradle.api.internal.artifacts.publish.DefaultPublishArtifact, which could serve our needs.
Our task now just creates a DefaultPublishArtifact, which is used as artifact in the publication. We will give it a try and see how this works, however, it looks like less duplication.

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