A while ago someone add this item to JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TINKERPOP-2411
which recommended moving the DSL related annotations to their own module, which would take with it the javapoet dependency and turn off annotation processing given usage of gremlin-core. Since gremlin-core is a base dependency it seems to make sense that having this separation is a good thing. Not sure if anyone has any experience in the area of annotation processing to say more but based on the argument made in the JIRA it seems like a good change to make. Unless there are any objections, I'll proceed to make that change for 3.6.0.