Hi Pete,
First of all, you don't need to remember Spring Roo commands and arguments. The Chapter 1 of
Spring Roo 1.1 Cookbook which is available for free shows how you can use TAB-based auto-completion feature of Spring Roo to discover the commands and it's arguments. I don't see that there is a steep learning curve in Spring Roo. All you need is some understanding of AspectJ ITDs, good understanding of Spring and how
Maven plugins are used. I have used Spring Roo over a period of one year now, and I'm quite happy with it.
In my opinion, most developers think of a RAD tool as a GUI based drag and drop application. After using Spring Roo for a while, you'll realize that it is very user friendly tool and may be using command-line driven shell is better than using a GUI based application
regards
ashish