[strictfp]

Hey! A colleague who also sees the light! I've been pushing for more programmatic control in our apps due to the same problems you mention. I would actually consider myself one of the most versed in Spring at our shop. But while I see so many problems, many devs only see "the beauty of the minimal code". I wish I could understand what is blindsiding them from all the problems we have.

The latest incarnation of this problem is Spring Boot. It does some really far out stuff to your app, like making m separate metrics for each unique url of your webapp. That goes south pretty quickly. Not to mention how much longer the app takes to start, how much slower it is compared to coding the same functionality manually (x4), how much trouble people have getting the right mental model of how the app works (with instrumented transaction boundaries and stuff that you mention), how hard it is to debug (why did this endpoint return 404?) etc.

We did some POCs with vert.x and spark, and all of a sudden you see what type of overcomplicated mess we have been creating for ourselves.