I'd like to understand how this relates to GRADLE-364

My expectation was that building a numbered release from
SVN would produce that exact numbered release version
once built, upon typing "gradle -v"

Now I'm not certain if I did something wrong,
am missing the point of the timestamps,
or if there's a bug.

Could you clarify this a bit?

This is an issue specific to the Gradle build itself. At the end of a non release build we have two things:

gradle-<version>-<timestamp1>-all.zip

If you run gradle -v against the above distribution you get:

------------------------------------------------------------
Gradle <version>-<timestamp2>
------------------------------------------------------------

timestamp1 and timestamp2 are not the same, there is a little delta. I don't know if this is strictly a bug, but it may cause confusion. So we should fix this.