The value I see is two-fold:
1) not needing to run on Java 5 in order to have clean dependency
injection. (I don't consider commons-attributes a proper
workaround--just a personal bias, of course)
this has nothing to do with java 5, you can just as easily inject fields as setters in java 1.4
2) being able to set dependencies in unit tests without involving a
mock Spring context.
then you didnt read my response in that thread closely enough. the injection happens /before/ the constructor of the class executes. so calling setters w/out the injector present in unit tests is already too late because the constructor needs to have those dependencies.
