I was also part of it. I did my own share of - well if we design it this way then we can have a second "type" that does X with the same interface. And it just keeps on iterating like that. It's still a useful pattern, but often at least in my own case, overused for really trivial stuff.

Programmers are highly trained like to see the world as if everything can be cast the same way. While that IS a good way to see a large variety of software problems, when you isolate down to a companies' use cases, it quickly goes away in the pragmatic sense. It then becomes something the company is paying for because they chose Java and Java developers like that sort of thing.