In the case of Spring what I wanted was adequate dependency injection. I was dealing with having to support releases across multiple historical branches, and w

In the case of Spring what I wanted was adequate dependency injection. I was dealing with having to support releases across multiple historical branches, and wanted to separate the core and business logic to allow for easier support on the older branches. I needed the dependency injection in order to break up cyclic dependencies across modules (without which the core and client logic could not be broken into separate repositories). Internally, the deployment tooling treated the profile as hierarchical; when I took over the project it was already using dynamically generated keys to store trees of data in the .properties files it was using for user profiles. It only became more hierarchical as time went on and the internal representation fully so - using a tree structure internally allowed for very clean subtree selects (which helped to clean up an entire class of bug, introduced on mass, during a particulary ill advised (and strongly advised against) piece of work (completed (despite being given without notice) in a single iteration - when it really needed at least 2). I would still have preferred to use an external format that allowed me to specify or generate schemas for the user profiles, and it also would have helped with supporting profile versioning (which would have been valuable for company internal users).