I too felt that Spring Boot was a response to the simplicity of Dropwizard. I worked at a place which had two opposing java camps. One was heavily into Spring Boot, the other, Dropwizard. This might not be a fair representation of Spring Boot, but unfortunately our Spring Boot crowd were card-carrying Spring-for-everything people who would over-engineer their systems to the point where a simple REST API would have thousands of lines of code, magic everywhere, mediocre performance, and present a nightmare learning curve for new engineers. The Dropwizard-based systems were far less magical and much easier to understand. Maybe Spring Boot can be just as nice, if the right people use it?