TestNG - Why?

It has been exactly 10 years since I last posted anything on blogger. I decided to start up again since I find myself sending a former colleague e-mails detailing what I am learning, doing and thinking. It seems more like stream of conciousness writing. Today (Saturday) I am working through the packtpub video course - "TestNG Complete Bootcamp for Beginners". On a scale of 1-10 I would give it a grade of 4. The presentation is not clean (seems like to presenter is doing thing on the fly), I have to listen at 1.5x the normal speed because he just goes too slow. Why am I learning TestNG? I started an apress book "Beginning Spring 5" and the author uses TestNG rather than JUnit. I can see the original movitation for the creation of TestNG (around the time of Junit3) when testers probably wanted more control and less of the baggage around Junit but today JUnit 5 is a great product to use. All the test examples are trival and baby programs so the course is more of a you can do 'this' you can do 'that' and hopefully you remember enough when you ever have a chance to work with TestNG. I don't imagine I will promote TestNG over JUnit. In fact, I am a bit motivated to check out JUnit 5 (we use JUnit 4 at the job.). I feel I start something like the Beginning Spring 5 that always requires that I learn something else in order to get the most out of the book. Let me just say this - I hate the Spring book off the bat. Why? It uses Maven from scratch. No IDE. And is skips some steps! I don't know if it is me or just the books authors are writing these days, but I find I have to put in more effort than I plan just to get things working.