Curious to know why you think WebSphere is a pain - I find it about as good as any complicated piece of software can get - it's reasonably documented, works most of the time and performance is good.

I used to know Websphere quite well (all the 5 - 6.x versions) and am happy to have managed to avoid it in the last three years.

It is the typical enterprise software suitable to sell consulting experience in what concerns configuration and management.

Endless list of configuration options, some of them only available via scripting and best of all IBM J9 specific features.

One of the issues we once had around 2006 was that our entity beans stubs would only work properly if compiled via J9.

Ah older versions. I started extensively working on WebSphere 7.5 onwards - in a course reversal with 8.5 one of our deployment which works fine with Oracle JVM spins the CPU 100% when ws uses J9 and that one ships with broken jconsole and missing jstack that does not want to connect to the spinning process! Joys of enterprise software..