I know of a few large production systems that have dispensed with typical servlet containers completely and are based on Netty's HTTP codecs instead, but as you said, the people who do these systems aren't necessarily bloggers.

I think this is a very positive trend towards more minimal software and more self-contained Java servers. Being able to ship (server) software as a single JAR file with everything you need embedded makes life a lot easier. It is very nice not having to fiddle around setting up servlet containers, configuring them, deploying applications into them and then, inevitably, having to restart everything when a rogue application decides to ruin the party for everyone. (And it just gets worse when you try to automate it).

One thing I'm still looking for is a good skeletal project for a REST server making use of JAX-RS annotations, Netty and having support for asynchronous request handling. Something that we could turn into a really skinny Maven archetype and teach new programmers to use.

(Obligatory disclosure and shameless plug: I work for Comoyo. If you find these things interesting/exciting and would like to come work for us feel free to contact us. We're hiring :) )