Of course I can't a priori prove that Spring is garbage, much like I can't a priori prove that it's better to be healthy and rich than to be poor and sick. It is a judgement call, but a judgement call that I believe I'm qualified to make, having worked with a large Spring codebase for 2.5 years.
You can ditch the xml almost entirely in spring 3, which I've been using for 2 years now. All you need is 50-100 boilerplate lines and the rest is annotations. I agree that 2.x was xml hell, but it is worlds better now.
I sense sarcasm, but 100 lines of xml in a 200,000 line web application is wonderful. And this xml is specifiying critical things like database connection and pool settings, transaction management, entity caching, and more. You are going to be configuring this stuff no matter what platform you use, and the simpler it is the better.
Java is a verbose language, but it's still awesome for a large category of projects. Are you a rails guy? how about those 50-500 lines of boilerplate code in the config files? Same thing as the Spring config files. Does that lead me to say "Why not Rails?" No it doesn't!
I've got an autocompletion feature up and running, but I'm usually not dependent from it. However, that wasn't my point. I wasn't complaining about long class names. That's just a bonus. I was complaining about the misuse/overuse of design patterns throughout the Java Standard Library as well as Swing.
See, design patterns are a thing that's nice to have but some of them are more like cheap hacks that have made it into an influential book rather than mandatory patterns. I'd go as far as claiming that some of these patterns are merely a way of hiding what's fundamentally broken about OOP in a language where it's the only paradigm and where it is strongly enforced - like Java.