I really reminds me situation I started to work with PlayFramework a few years ago. Its excelent JAVA web framework, but its done in completely(internaly) different way than how the rest of the JAVA frameworks being done(using standard servlet concept). The developers of Play! have a nice section on their site(under FAQ) called: "You guys don’t even know how to program in Java..." and they are trying to explain here why they did many things in a very different way in many areas that others describe as it is against a "good JAVA practices"
http://www.playframework.org/documentation/1.1/faq David
