I don't think that style of code is wide-spread in the real world; this feels like a total straw-man. Annotations are normally much better than any alternative

I don't think that style of code is wide-spread in the real world; this feels like a total straw-man. Annotations are normally much better than any alternative we've come up with (e.g. XML), but the extreme case where you use every annotation is less appealing. To me, this feels like a serious code-smell. Do you want to link your API data representation (XML/JSON) with your DB representation? Why does your JSON have a different structure to your XML? If I'm wrong (it happens) and this is wide-spread, IDEs could implement folding for annotations to make this more manageable. The XML annotations would fold together, the JSON together, the ORM together. Or we could have different views, like LightTable. There just aren't that many sets of annotations.