If some other mod would also include slick-util, it would cause a conflict.
Maybe try something like jarjar or the Shadow Gradle plugin.

But I don't know whether the Shadow plugin would be compatible to Gradle 2.0 (that's old) and Forge.

I'll give it a shot and see what happens. If it doesn't work, I'm hesitant to simply have the user put that in their mods directory since a) it's not a mod and b) other mods that depend on slick-util might not use that shared library which would mean we're back at square 1 for dependencies. I may leave it and just roll a custom/integrated solution if another mod has compatibility issues.

Completely removed the dependency on slick-util and TTF fonts in general.

I think the same is for Brotli.

I know this is poor form and it pains me to say this but I think it's best (considering the package management hell that is shared dependencies for Forge Gradle) that I just pare down the Brotli lib to get rid of all the features I don't use (it's not a terribly small library) and move the namespace.