Exactly my experience. Most Java code base end up using all kind of clever tricks like you said, runtime reflection, bytecode manipulation, source code pre-proc

Exactly my experience. Most Java code base end up using all kind of clever tricks like you said, runtime reflection, bytecode manipulation, source code pre-processing/generation, pushing all logic to configuration, abuse of compiler annotations, etc. These actually create a bigger disaster, because unlike Lisp macros or higher order functions, they have even less structure, and are completely non-standard. I'd rather people use well thought out mechanism for extension and "cleverness" than some poor ad-hoc variant to do the same.