Yeah, Spring is incredibly 'magic' heavy. Works great when you know the exact right annotation incantation, but it's a pain to actually understand what's going on.

I've found the official documentation to be very detailed, so it's helpful if you really need in-depth knowledge, but if you don't it's a bit hard to parse out the relevant bits. Copying something from the official guides seems often the easiest way...

In regards to the community, I didn't find it to be much smaller? The stack overflow tag is very active. I have the same experience that nobody I know wants to learn Spring out of their own volition though.