...because it's designer friendly

Here's just one quick note that I just couldn't live without sharing.

There's an opinion that it is better to use a more declarative approach to web development (like JSF/Facelets does) because it is easier and more comfortable for the web designers to interact with the page design.

Web Designers are NOT developers! Much less JavaEE developers knowledgeable in JSF technologies. Get over it! NetBeans, Eclipse - those are Developer tools - not designers'! A designer prefers Photoshop for graphics (oh wait - there's no such thing in Eclipse, NetBeans nor in Idea like advanced image editor) and Expression Web or Dreamweaver (again, no viable counterpart in any of the IDEs).

And now for the most shocking part:

Designers don't speak JSF/Facelets nor any of the JSF frameworks like RichFaces or IceFaces. They speak HTML, CSS, possibly JavaScript too (if you're lucky!). For them a div is a div, a span is a span and a a-href is an a-href.

And I distinctly remember someone saying that it is easier to get designers to contribute to the project if you use Java Server Faces...