If going down this route, I'd probably look into using Kotlin with dropwizard, rather than Java. Maybe it's just me, but the amount of code you have to write in Java that really should be auto-generated (and often is, by an IDE) is absurd.

I've not toyed extensively with Kotlin yet, but so far it does look like a "modern Java done right". Most of the code you don't actually need to write, or read -- like getters and setters that just get and set.

And it's close enough to plain Java that there's little overhead, and not a whole new language -- like with Scala, or Clojure.