Ah, gotcha; thanks for elaborating!
Yeah, I feel fortunate that I didn’t get sucked into the hype for Enterprise Java Beans, although I’m under the impression it’s been greatly overhauled in recent years.
Libraries that return Object references and expect the programmer to correctly type cast them are indeed annoying. I tend to abstract this away behind wrapper functions but I’d much rather not feel compelled to do so in the first place.
Probably all of the above. 
I recall hearing horror stories in the early days of Maven where developers would spend more time wrestling with pom.xml than writing code.
Many Java libraries now offer the option to configure via @annotations instead of XML, e.g. Spring, but XML is still very common in the Java ecosystem.