I don't mind the core of spring but the full spring stack is nearly as bad as Java EE - I was reading through what was suppose to be a simple minimalist tutorial on how to implement CRUD operations in spring the other day and my jaw dropped at the amount of duplication, verbosity & incomprehensible config involved:

http://www.adobocode.com/spring/adding-crud-capability-to-sp...

I'm personally into much simpler stuff like Stripes & Guice.