I don't think it's a matter of taste. TBH I write very little of the code that is checked in to the source control. The IDE does all the boilerplate. I literally design the method signatures, define the access policy for the methods and fill in a few gaps here and there.
Play is not Java done right by any means. It's tightly coupled, has really poor documentation, breaking changes galore between major releases, deployment is trouble (compared to tomcat) and rather tied to Scala's API.
Java done right is picking some lego bricks that you stick together to get what you want and telling it how to wire them up.
YYMV but 99.9% of all problems are already solved off the shelf.
I agree a bit with the Play framework comments. It has some interesting things borrowed from Rails but it borrowed to much of the magic for my tasted. I'm using Wicket right now. which is very nice and flexible and well documented. The source code is easy to understand it is not lasagna.
Ninja Framework is rather nice, I've found. I looked around for Java web frameworks lately and it seemed to be the one that balanced good documentation, features, simple configuration and so on to my liking.
Play is not Java done right by any means. It's tightly coupled, has really poor documentation, breaking changes galore between major releases, deployment is trouble (compared to tomcat) and rather tied to Scala's API.
Java done right is picking some lego bricks that you stick together to get what you want and telling it how to wire them up.
YYMV but 99.9% of all problems are already solved off the shelf.