Making the beast perform *does* require a certain amount of skill. :-P
Of course, if you don't use EJB, a lot of the bookkeeping goes away.
BTW, good call on the Rod Johnson book. I'm digging it. He has a lot of good bad things to say about J2EE.
I'm looking into his [link|http://www.springframework.org/|Spring Framework], as well -- it's become a full-fledged open source project.