As former JSF framework tech lead built on top of Richfaces, the major problem with JSF was its lifecycle model and the fact that Sun et al only defined the basic infrastructure and lead to a forest of frameworks that could hardly interoperate among themselves.

To the point that on my follow up project I ended up recomending for JSP with tag libraries instead, regardless of Sun advising them as deprecated and replaced by JSF.

WebForms never felt as complex as JSF.

I feel JSP like models with component libraries, or MVC are more closer approaches to the whole Web programming model.