[martinced]

"Having a 50K lines of code dedicated to just inversion of control or O/R mapping makes a problem a lot more complex than it probably needs to be."

Exactly. That's the terrible stuff with all this "enterprisey" mindset: people are working on medium-sized codebase made of this special kind of hell that Java/C# + ORM ([N]hibernate) + XML + SQL is and these app often run into the 200K / 300 KLOC lines if not more. Yet what does these applications really do? Actually not very much. Yet these programmers are sure to be working on super-advanced stuff because their codebase is big.

When several companies reported a drop in LOC of 90% by switching to something else than Java then at one point you have to at least consider that maybe most of your Java codebase is hot air.