To me, it looks like this happens when you can't easily build new things by reusing old ones (in this case annotations). If a developer was able to combine mul

To me, it looks like this happens when you can't easily build new things by reusing old ones (in this case annotations). If a developer was able to combine multiple annotations into one easily, they would be better able to express themselves in the typical cases sketchy example: @SerializableTo(name='orders', exclude='json'); @BelongsTo('customer') private List orders; then @BelongsTo is implemented using @ManyToMany, @Fetch, @JoinTable. Can you do that with annotations in Java without rewriting them from scratch?