I got a away with the impression that some of those large, enterprise-ey applications are so large and convoluted in the way they are specified that the bloat J

I got a away with the impression that some of those large, enterprise-ey applications are so large and convoluted in the way they are specified that the bloat Java EE adds appears negligible. After I had the honor of writing a few simple-minded Perl-CGI-script to give my boss an overview of projects our company is working on and their respective profit margins, I begun to understand why. If somebody tells me computers are complicated, I tell them that computers are trivial compared to accounting. Or my brain is just wired that way... Listening to our accountants always makes me feel like me IQ just dropped by fifty percent (or more). So if somebody writes a piece of software that is somehow involved with accounting, it is bound to be very complex with lots of special cases and exceptions. I have nothing but the utmost respect for our accountants who manage to deal with this insanity without sacrificing a goat to Cthulhu or something. TL;DR - once one reaches that level of complexity, the complexity JavaEE puts into the mix is probably fairly tame and one has bigger fish to fry or escape from.