[npstr]

You don't have to take me serious to derive value from the post. It's obvious anecdotal, just shares a story. I skipped some of the details to focus on the topic of Spring. But I think I can add some as you have rightly spotted they are missing: The major problem was imho indeed engineering management of that specific team, which was also swapped out at the same time I was put on the team (which was before we got the buy in to rewrite it). There were actually at least two dev generations of the team building the software before ours. The first one caused the most damage by the demented infrastructure decisions, while the second iteration was not able to successfully challenge that, even though they had the right ideas already. New engineering management was awesome in that they supported devs with most of our radical ideas, but also pulled in resources from other departments to help deal with the largest pain points such as adding Spring Boot quite early in the mending journey, with the heavy lifting being done by an expert from another team temporarily joining us.

Forgive my judgy wordings in the direction of seniority...our org has (had?) an issue where complexity is rewarded over simplicity. Some senior people here all they could do is build something so clusterfucked noone can understand it. Funnily enough, this project was originally launched to replace a legacy system noone was able to (or unwilling to) maintain.