For most IT programmers (who were now the Java coders) CORBA was esoterica. So the JEE specs were never appreciated for their clarity and the necessary abstractions were deemed as "ceremony". Sun did a great job on the specs. They dropped the ball on (a) the pedogogical front (your precise point actually), and (b) crippling JEE specs to induce the likes of IBM to invest in J2EE app server development.
