It's not like Oracle even cares about the "EE" name anymore, so why not? I mean, for crying out loud, Java EE 7 came out over 3 years ago but they still don't o

It's not like Oracle even cares about the "EE" name anymore, so why not? I mean, for crying out loud, Java EE 7 came out over 3 years ago but they still don't offer any certifications for it, but they do for Java SE 8 which is just under a year younger. And you're right, most people doing greenfield at this point are probably using "EE" components in "SE" projects. I use Spring (Boot), but also use Narayana (JTA), Hibernate (JPA), ActiveMQ (JMS), and if Spring didn't handle DI itself I'd pull in Weld (CDI) as well. Hell, if you don't want to use Spring you can just use Wildfly Swarm. Java EE is dead, even if Oracle finally finalizes Java EE 8 I see most work migrating from wars/ears deployed to containers to running embedded containers like Spring Boot (+pick your container) or Wildfly Swarm.