[KronisLV]

Idk how I feel about this, my experience is the opposite of this.

Most Spring (+Boot) projects have been far more painful to work with - numerous abstractions and deep and complex relationships between them just to support every technology and integration under the sun. Hard to work with, hard to debug (especially with proxies and how the DI works, alongside the nonsensical rules about how @Transactional works, e.g. how it doesn't if you call a transactional method from within the same component/service), sometimes performs like shit or leaks memory and migrations between major versions are a pain. We just spent multiple months migrating a project from an old Spring version to a more recent version of Spring Boot. It's a pain.

Compare that to Dropwizard: it is fairly stable and most updates are maintenance related. It uses a bunch of idiomatic packages from the ecosystem: Jetty, Jersey, Jackson, Logback, Hibernate/JDBI3, supports Liquibase or Flyway, there's also validation and views or whatever you want, but none of it is pushed down your throat. The docs are practical and more manageable just because it does LESS overall, the code is simpler and there are far fewer surprises. And because the logic is mostly just Java and there's no castle-in-the-sky bullshit with annotations, if you want to swap out HK2 for Dagger (if you still want DI), you can - which I think is good because Dagger also does a lot at compile time and avoids the whole Spring runtime injection can of worms altogether.

The size of a framework doesn't instantly make it good or bad, but oftentimes the bigger ones will be more difficult to reason about and sometimes the amount of abstractions gets out of hand.