It's actually not that hard to beat. Quarkus proved that it's way better than Spring Boot in a lot of aspects based on open standards and battle tested frameworks like Vertx. Also on Quarkus you can use in parallel blocking and non-blocking IO and also high level declarative routes with annotations to lower lever vertx routes and handlers.
The rubegoldbergery around DI is amazing. You don't really need a DI library in many cases. A single Java SPI supplying access to all interface dependencies works extremely well. You provide a default implementation consumers can override using basic SPI mechanics. Done.
