I agree with you completely on that. I'll clarify that, to me, there's a difference between straight-forward and obvious. And Spring is terrible at being obvious. Some annotation on a class 5 transitive dependencies deep can affect your code. It's definitely really deep into "spooky action at a distance", and that's always a nightmare for debugging. But once you see all the pieces, it's (usually) relatively straight-forward to describe what is happening.