I can sympathize with your rant. I remember the first time I started using the spring framework! It’s not bad once you get used to it, though. There are whole swarms of Java programmers who are really Spring programmers because that’s the only way they know how to do anything.

Anyways, I would highly recommend using IntelliJ and Dropwizard, both of which “just work”. Don’t worry about anything else, just use the DW docs.