>They're big and they have a lot of money, so they usually prefer slow, complex, and consistent over rapid development dice rolls.
These two statements seem contradictory to me. The entire point of using Spring is to be able to not worry about the cumbersome and gain efficiencies in development. Spring is no different than rails, a framework thats highly regarded for fast development
Apparently the things I want to do are either impossible or require so much indirection it's easier to rip it out and just write it yourself...
You may have detected I'm not a fan!
With Spring Boot a lot has been simplified, I never used Spring before that because I had similar thoughts as you.
Nowadays when I have to work without Spring (my current job doesn't use it, for example) I keep yearning for it as there's just so much productivity gains after you know the framework.
It's funny because I have said in the past the exact same arguments as you, it just comes from lack of experience. I recommend stop hating it and sincerely give a try on properly learning and using it for a while, I still have some reservations and grievances with Spring but not these shallow ones :)
Having said that, I stand by my performance criticism. I have done some detailed profiling on spring and non spring versions of code (I didn't write the spring parts, a spring expert did). It really does add a lot of overhead to start up and transactions vs. straightforward POJOs and JDBC code.