Java frameworks are made for very large enterprise systems operating at high scale. Not for startups or POCs or personal projects. Frameworks for that actually

Java frameworks are made for very large enterprise systems operating at high scale. Not for startups or POCs or personal projects. Frameworks for that actually exist in Java too, but they are harder to find. Once you know Spring, it actually makes you faster at building robust systems. Hibernate too, though SQL is easy enough I'd recommend against it, but c3p0 is a must for robustness, and hibernate does make it easy to switch to it. Now, Java is akin to PHP in that a lot of devs use it at small to medium size companies that don't always value tech. This means a lot of Java is written badly, concepts are misunderstood, best practices like layered architecture, interface indirection, class inheritance are pushed to extreme nonsense and abused greatly. Kafka and Zookeeper and Maven are hard to setup, but it's because they solve very complex prolems. I don't know any other open source dependency manager who offer the robust features of maven like self hosting, build and dependency resolution all in one and signed artifacts. Zookeeper is like the only coordination frameowrk that passes Jepsen. Kafka is unmatched in its special use case too. You're playing with framework handling highly complex problems, you shouldn't expect the easiest learning curves. Why are you even playing with these? There's very little project that would need such beasts.