I find that, with the addition of Spring version 3+, it becomes much more easier to bootstrap a Spring Web application with all the basics. The advantage of Spring MVC is that once you've bootstrapped the application context and the database connection, it becomes incredibly easy to create new controllers and it follows a much more logic architecture that newer developers may actually find easier as they get more familiar with it.
In fact, at my previous place of work, we were in the process of building a Java Servlet Web application, but we found that we had to create our own architecture or spine of the application and that is actually more work. Spring can take care of that which means that developers can get on with the actually application logic instead of worrying about the architecture too much.
