I do understand why there was a need for all these abstractions, but I just think it got way out of hand. "Programming" java became more about gluing frameworks

I do understand why there was a need for all these abstractions, but I just think it got way out of hand. "Programming" java became more about gluing frameworks together using XML than about writing code. The culture of enterprise java programmers directed people to bring in all these abstractions, "just in case" they might need them in the future. The language may be neutered, but the over-architects took the last bit of fun out of it. I've really only been viewing this from the deployment side for quite a while, but when I'm trying to help you troubleshoot your relatively simple webapp, and I have thousands of lines of stacktraces that bubbled up through a half dozen frameworks, it's hard to blame just the language.