Well, it's been a while since I left the java world. Back then it was all about "inverse of control", Spring and the ilk, and maven was starting out. People were basically competing about who can move the most code from java files to xml descriptors and who had the smartest pom.xml...

Maybe things have bettered since then but from what I see at least the maven disease seems to still be all over the place. I'm not saying that all these things are necessarily bad. I just grew really tired of juggling monstrous xml blobs around while still being forced to write (or generate) metric tons of boilerplate code.