[ragnese]

I think you hit the nail on the head with your reflection on your attitude with respect to Ruby on Rails.

From my point of view, Java is an anemic language, and the "cure" appears to be to introduce a bunch of annotation-magic frameworks (Spring + JacksonXML + Hibernate/JPA/JDBC/whatever + Lombok?) that each have their own magic and inconsistencies, to the point that your Java code is more of a configuration file than actual logic (which sounds great), but with the downside that you don't actually know where anything is actually implemented and have little idea about what can fail and where.

As a "polyglot" dev, I just don't have the time or patience to learn all of the magic on top of the language itself.

On the topic of Vert.x, it's definitely a different philosophy than Spring, as you experienced. I'm honestly not sure what domains Vert.x would be superior in, but it seems like it's way overkill for your typical mostly-crud backend app. Vert.x is less of a framework and more like a "build-your-own-framework" toolkit.