100% agree. I don't buy the verbosity argument one bit. Yes it's more verbose than a dynamically typed language but it's not like you get nothing in return for that verbosity. When working with serious, mission-critical code, the verbosity (and accompanying clarity) is a godsend.

The only part of writing/maintaining code that I've found easier/more pleasant with dynamically typed languages is writing unit tests (due to the fact that mocking an object is as simple as just declaring a hash literal or JSON object). On the other hand, I find that I need to write extra unit tests to verify integrity that would be be verified at compile time in a strongly typed language like Java.

I would strongly recommend people check out DropWizard. It's an opinionated framework for writing Java servers that comes with a handpicked stack. It has many of the convention driven advantages of e.g. Rails but fundamentally you're still writing code in Java (or another JVM language like Kotlin).