To me, it looks like this happens when you can't easily build new things by reusing old ones (in this case annotations). If a developer was able to combine multiple annotations into one easily, they would be better able to express themselves in the typical cases

sketchy example:

  @SerializableTo(name='orders', exclude='json');
  @BelongsTo('customer')
  private List orders;

then @BelongsTo is implemented using @ManyToMany, @Fetch, @JoinTable.

Can you do that with annotations in Java without rewriting them from scratch?