Fully agree. I've inherited an insane desktop application that uses the spring XML bean configuration. Then there's classes used to configure the configuration. And three separate property class types to pass the properties into the context, only one of which will persist the properties. And factory beans to instantiate a different bean depending on the properties passed in. And different XML configurations for each subproject which somehow join together but sometimes complain about dependencies being defined in the wrong place... Total nightmare.

It's basically impossible to know what will be instantiated, extremely hard to inject and configure things. When I find the time I'm going to just create things directly from Java with constructor injection and ditch the whole sorry mess.

Edit: did I mention how unbelievably slow it is as well?!