I'm not critical of spring because real life software projects are messy. I'm critical because I rarely if ever do greenfield development and when I'm debugging a production exception caused by something that Java's type system was perfectly capable of treating as a compile time error that is suddenly a runtime error I'm a little bit sad. And the sheer frequency that I encounter them indicates that just getting more disciplined developers isn't really a solution here.
The real solution is to bite the bullet and build Spring's features into Java. Make as many failures as possible detectable during compilation, and go back to hard typing.
