No kidding. J2EE is an abomination, and is almost single-handedly responsible for destroying Java's reputation with a lot of programmers. Spring is a giant leap forward.
Grails is basically Spring MVC, wrapped in dynamic language goodness. I'm using it for a project right now, and it's shockingly terse and clean. It's also a lot of fun, which is something I never thought I'd say about a Java "Enterprise Framework".
Sorry to hear that you don't like Hibernate. I'm using it for a project right now, and I greatly prefer it to ActiveRecord. The trick is to use a framework (yes, a framework!) like Grails to autogenerate a lot of the configuration crap for you.
I suspect that your large project was built by "Java Engineers" who tried to stuff way too much into the ORM layer. That's an abuse of the tool, not an indictment of the tool itself.
Grails is basically Spring MVC, wrapped in dynamic language goodness. I'm using it for a project right now, and it's shockingly terse and clean. It's also a lot of fun, which is something I never thought I'd say about a Java "Enterprise Framework".