I will add though after converting from a huge jpa spring boot rest service to just read since data from a database, node and graphql and plain SQL is a joy... That might have more to do with the fact that I'm starting this thing over and not inheriting design decisions..
Give it time. You can get a lot done with node, graphql and plain SQL. Although when you're working on a project with 50+ developers that is where the Spring JPA, Spring Boost, Tomcat, Maven come in their own managing less skilled developer to contribute to the team.
The other problem is when you're starting out you lose out on a lot of historic perspective. You get smashed over the head with Maven, Spring 1,2,3 (ORM, JPA) inverse versioning code, Hibernate, Transactions, Annotations, Servlet, JSP document/JSP pages.
Each collectively take about a year to get confident to give accurate quotes for large government projects. Let alone figuring what the hell the framework is doing.
Free time i use mostly php/python. Havent given Ruby on Rails a go, how does it compare with connection pools? Oracle db connection drivers and Postgres databases?
