The following happens when the destinationDir is changed:

subprojects {
task("${project.name}_jar").destinationDir = file(distDir)
}

This causes the libs task to output all my subprojects generated jars in a single directory of my choice, which was what I intended. What I didn't intend was the following:

missing artifact com.bla#bla-interface;1.0!bla-interface.jar:
/home/pieter/development/trunk/bla-interface/build/bla-interface-1.0.jar file does not exist
/home/pieter/development/trunk/bla-interface/build/distributions/bla-interface-1.0.jar file does not exist
published ivy to /home/pieter/development/trunk/build-resolver/com.bla/bla-interface/1.0/ivys/ivy.xml