I have seen what you are talking about, but there is no reason why java programming should have to go hand in hand with utter dependence on third party libraries. Where I used to work, there were two programming departments. We both did Java, but the other department was dead set on spending days and weeks researching third party solutions for simple problems. Then they would spend trying to learn the interface. Then inevitably, if there was a problem, it always seemed to be in the third part code. Well, of course, if you need to add two plus two, and you download a Cray simulator library to accomplish this, then you have to instantiate the library, and seed it with the two numbers, and start the thread that does the calculation, then receive the even that it is done, then retrieve the data, well you see where this is going.
I am not in favor of reinventing the wheel, but if it is going to take less time for me to write something than to research third party solutions and figure out how to integrate to them, and I can control the code, then I will be reinventing that wheel rather than download the global transportation library so I can use their wheel.