Play is not Java done right by any means. It's tightly coupled, has really poor documentation, breaking changes galore between major releases, deployment is trouble (compared to tomcat) and rather tied to Scala's API.
Java done right is picking some lego bricks that you stick together to get what you want and telling it how to wire them up.
YYMV but 99.9% of all problems are already solved off the shelf.
Scala can be used instead of Java to build systems, though when a Java developer uses it for the first time to build a system, that system will need heavy refactoring to make use of Scala's functional facilities. Groovy's really intended for use with Java, not instead of it, such as gluing Java apps together, testing Java objects, scripting Grails, and 20-liners for Gradle builds. I don't know how much Clojure's used to build systems in industry, though it's certainly my language for scripting.
form {
input {
name = "bob"
label = "Bob"
}
button {
action = #{bean.submit}
}
}
That said, I found FXML + IntelliJ to be quite painless. The closing tags are verbose when you have small toy examples but in big files they help orient you by reminding you what the end of a block is. And I mostly use Scene Builder anyway.
1. OO is bad. Every paradigm is bad if you misuse it. If you build deep abstractions then you will hang yourself regardless. Some very elegant and simple designs can emerge from OO code, but only if you think about the problems first. The majority of pain consists of forgetting to do that step. There is no magic bullet - FP has its own pitfalls as well as does simple procedural programming.
2. Everything looks like it's written by an architect. Well that's a broad generalisation and I'm sure some people titled architect would be sick at the association (considering they usually reduce complexity) but the problem here is that people aren't using the frameworks properly. Not joking but the last two or three Java web applications I've put together have virtually no code in them. It's just the domain model, the views and query encapsulations. Nothing else. The abstract factory factory factory factory crap isn't your problem. If you make it your problem, then you're just doing it wrong or not using the tools provided efficiently.
3. Android. Android is abysmal (I've written a couple of things for it so far), but that's not because of Java but the fact that the Android API and versioning mess is a pile of unstable crap. It'd be nice if there were't so many exceptions.
If you're going to pick on Java, at least jump on: Idiotic code on the web, Glassfish being a right pile, view technology being foul, servlet container reloading, Swing/JavaFX or Eclipse...