Speaking of Jackson and performance... I have been working on Jagger for a while now, which aims to replace all that reflection during databind with annotation processing.
I am trying to aim for something like Mapstruct for the developer experience, since everybody loves Mapstruct. With Jagger, you bring a parser (JSON/XML/whatever), define some databind methods, and it generates the implementation for you.
So far I've only had my own use cases, so I would love to have some wider feedback.
The code will not look pretty but it will be very fast.