Back when it was J2EE, development was bloated with interfaces, implementations and XML files you had to create for each EJB. JavaEE is POJO based and is actually very light-weight. JBoss itself is a micro-kernel with a bunch of services plugged in, so you can actually configure a very small server instance that is still compliant with the API specifications.

I was ready to give up on JavaEE around version 1.4, but it's so much fun to program JavaEE now. A lot more like TurboGears or RoR (lots of meta-programming and default "scaffolding").