I've had my short stint at using Spring. Often I was dropped into a project where it's already setup and working. When something breaks or I want to extend/modify what was working, I hit a wall in terms of discoverability: how it's been working all this time, and how to find a suitable level of documentation to help me. There are reams of documentation for Spring, but nothing of the kind that'll help me if I'm lost. So, from my perspective, it's write-only framework; it's hard to reason back.
I spent a lot of time with spring, and became a bit of an expert on it, I'm able to debug and understand most issues that come up with it.
Still, I agree wholeheartedly, there is too much magic, it's very difficult for someone to come into a spring codebase without a lot of background experience, and understand how things tie together, and I don't think it's really time well spent acquiring that experience.
