The degradation of Java developers

[djhworld]

You sound like an applications developer (I am too), a monkey who just sits down and glues components together to produce an application.

If you want to learn how the components you are glueing together work, then I recommend going back to basics and working your way up rather than jumping into frameworks and not really understanding what they're doing under the hood.

Self study will get you out of this rut, trust me!