I don't feel like Spring can fix the core problems here, unfortunately--they're Java Problems, and Java Problems grow more and more acute as time goes on (though Java 8 is a good step in the right direction).

The pleasant, compositional interaction borne of Scala's syntactical flexibility is why Play's wonderful to use (and Akka as the backend is largely behind-the-scenes). I used to be a detractor early in Play2 because of some large-scale-unfriendly decisions, but they've pretty much all been fixed.