I think you've nailed it. Web programming in javaland was verbose but relatively straightforward until about 2004, maybe a little earlier, when frameworks expl

I think you've nailed it. Web programming in javaland was verbose but relatively straightforward until about 2004, maybe a little earlier, when frameworks exploded. I'm not sure the frameworks themselves were worse than what preceded then - Struts2 was, in my opinion, an improvement over the original Struts. But I do recall hating web programming for a few years, wanting to leave and do something else (in a way, I did, I got a job writing java code to interact with CPLEX, and other developers handled the webapp stuff, so I was able to just mainly write straightforward Java, which I still don't think is such a bad language, it was the framework bloat that I disliked). The reason was doing very simple things had become mind numbingly difficult, and you had to wade through massive amounts of configuration and framework documentation (or code, since documentation often didn't exist for your specific issue) to do relatively simple things. The Java web programming cookbook became relatively obsolete, because everything was now handle by a framework that promised to make things simpler, but (often due to churn) massively increased the overhead. Interestingly, it was, as you've pointed out, never resolved. Instead, it all became obsolete. I personally left javaland and started writing with Rails (even the non-web stuff I generally started using Python rather than java). I suspect that we're heading down that road again. I think the modern javascript frameworks are the product of very intelligent and talented people, but my gues is that something interesting and "unanticipated" will sweep this all aside. To risk a prediction, I think that other languages transpiled to isomorphic javascript will provide a new approach that will allow excellent languages like ruby and python to be used to write an entire web app again. Until then? I wish I'd had the conviction to avoid MVC frameworks in the early 2000s. It's easy to feel like you're doing things the "old way", but I wasted a lot of time chasing java frameworks only to abandon the entire enterprise a year or two later… of course, it wasn't entirely my decision, it's hard to go against the grain, since you're rarely the only developer on a team.