[a_imho]

I am not sold on the premise that plumbing code is bad or not business logic, being explicit is no trouble, it is part of the story. How is writing a factory method worse than writing Spring configurations? Personally I prefer to write Java to Spring DSL.

[lmm]

The point is you don't have to write the Spring configuration (except in the rare cases where you need to override with something specific). Just mark each class's constructor as @Autowired, make an AnnotationConfiguredApplicationContext passing the list of all your classes, and you don't have to manually keep track of which services need which other services - Spring takes care of instantiating everything in order and passing dependencies into the things that need them.