It occurs to me that dependency injection has this strange similarity to functional programming. I mean, clearly, you're playing with objects instead of functions, and they can have state, and so on, so it's not functional. But still, there's a similarity in how you're breaking things apart.

Spring: Maybe the problem is that Jave EE 1.5 was a reasonably good solution for the problems it was trying to solve? Maybe you can't do radically better and still actually solve the problems?