I don't think it's a matter of taste. TBH I write very little of the code that is checked in to the source control. The IDE does all the boilerplate. I literally design the method signatures, define the access policy for the methods and fill in a few gaps here and there.

Play is not Java done right by any means. It's tightly coupled, has really poor documentation, breaking changes galore between major releases, deployment is trouble (compared to tomcat) and rather tied to Scala's API.

Java done right is picking some lego bricks that you stick together to get what you want and telling it how to wire them up.

YYMV but 99.9% of all problems are already solved off the shelf.