[lmartel]

You're right--instead of "can't" I should have said that a lot fewer Java developers are willing to mess with them, vs. changing code.

Edit: and they're hacky because they're magical--it's entirely not obvious what they're doing.

[mhixson]

This is sort of getting off topic, but... I agree that annotations are magical. The good news is that they announce magic is happening. When I see unfamiliar annotations in Java code I know to look at their javadocs. I like that kind of magic much more than magic by convention (e.g. the location of the given file on disk).