Agreed. It's also possible to use frameworks such as Spring Data/Boot, Roo or Grails to get started really quickly - a bit like the django/rails crowd. Lots of interesting things happening in Java world at the moment.
It seems like originally Java drew from the mega complex enterprise application world influenced by people building large scale C++ apps etc so were hardly aware of the complexity they were adding. Now there is a lot of influence from modern web frameworks to quickly developing and expanding an app.
Touch to maintain some of those old Java apps though from 5-10 years ago in some cases.
The problem with Grails is, like you said, it focuses on getting started quickly, rather then producing a maintainable and performant codebase. I mean, Hibernate is very complex in itself, and adding another layer (GORM) on top of it won't make things better.
If I were to start a new java project, I would probably choose Dropwizard (http://dropwizard.io/), which is more a collection of libraries then a framework.
The business model of the Grails development has always been about integrating various existing software into one branded product for "full-stack" development, such as Groovy and Spring. The Spring and Grails crowds inside Vmware seem to do everything together now (e.g. SpringOne2GX conferences) so I suspect they're now already one group, and that it's the Grails project that's taken over Spring just like they previously took over Groovy.
It seems like originally Java drew from the mega complex enterprise application world influenced by people building large scale C++ apps etc so were hardly aware of the complexity they were adding. Now there is a lot of influence from modern web frameworks to quickly developing and expanding an app.
Touch to maintain some of those old Java apps though from 5-10 years ago in some cases.