Trying to upvote this because it's good info! But, but, I have one better :)
Spring Boot 1.0 GA Released [1] blog post, says, and links to a Spring Issue SPR-9888:
"It's been 18 months since the original request [2] to "improve containerless web application architectures", that gave birth to Spring Boot, was raised."
The body of the original issue [2] says, midway down:
"I think that Spring's web application architecture can be significantly simplified if it were to provided tools and a reference architecture that leveraged the Spring component and configuration model from top to bottom. Embedding and unifying the configuration of those common web container services within a Spring Container bootstrapped from a simple main() method.
Though there are many frameworks and platforms today that no longer require a container I think inspiration can be drawn most from DropWizard (http://dropwizard.codahale.com/).
Another project I've seen inspired by DropWizard but leveraging Spring is HalfPipe (https://github.com/32degrees/halfpipe). Though I don't think HalfPipe goes far enough. I think to truly provide simplification the entire architecture, wherever reasonable, must be embedded within the Spring container rather than without. Though it does have several other interesting ideas."
It could absolutely be both. Dave Syer is not the only person who drove Spring Boot. Phil Webb is the main day-to-day driver, from what I can tell. He's definitely been active in soliciting feedback from Labs Pivots.
Spring Boot 1.0 GA Released [1] blog post, says, and links to a Spring Issue SPR-9888:
"It's been 18 months since the original request [2] to "improve containerless web application architectures", that gave birth to Spring Boot, was raised."
The body of the original issue [2] says, midway down:
"I think that Spring's web application architecture can be significantly simplified if it were to provided tools and a reference architecture that leveraged the Spring component and configuration model from top to bottom. Embedding and unifying the configuration of those common web container services within a Spring Container bootstrapped from a simple main() method.
Though there are many frameworks and platforms today that no longer require a container I think inspiration can be drawn most from DropWizard (http://dropwizard.codahale.com/).
Another project I've seen inspired by DropWizard but leveraging Spring is HalfPipe (https://github.com/32degrees/halfpipe). Though I don't think HalfPipe goes far enough. I think to truly provide simplification the entire architecture, wherever reasonable, must be embedded within the Spring container rather than without. Though it does have several other interesting ideas."
[1] https://spring.io/blog/2014/04/01/spring-boot-1-0-ga-release...
[2] https://jira.spring.io/browse/SPR-9888