This won't be an answer but it might be a path to an answer. Make yourself a list of the things
EJB is supposed to do for you: Declarative security, bean managed transactions, bean managed persistence, bean pools to reduce object creation & destruction, remote access, cluster support, productivity, ease of deployment, run-time management, etc. There really are quite a few. For each one, rank how well you think EJB does the job from 1 to 5. For example, lots of people rank BMP very low but BMT works well with my requirements today. Maybe your deployment team has never seen it before - big learning curve. Then for each one rank how important it is to your project. Throw in some alternatives like POJO, Spring or Hibernate and see how they stack up, too. You can pretend to be scientific by multiplying how well it works by how much you need it, or just get a feel for whether it hits your high priorities.
[ October 12, 2005: Message edited by: Stan James ]