Lately I have insight similar to 'what hardware improvements give, software bloat take it away', 'what JDK platforms give third party Java frameworks take it away.

I have this misfortune of dealing daily with a nasty Java framework which converts compile time errors into runtime errors, single error trace with multiple stack traces , most of them being from framework itself.

One thing that might improve situation is server side libraries instead of framework. However AFAIK there is nothing like that in Java world. Everything is bound to Servlet API at lowest level and app server/frameworks on top of it.