Unfortunately in the last six month companies are liferaying. I guess there is a misunderstanding about the portal concept in the mangement level that has made all companies to work on portal and this certain portal server.
Well, I see no good structure in Liferay. liferay  is a museum of antipatterns cause it is 7 years old and Chinese haved developed this software without major refactoring. Liferay has started its life 7 years ago with no MVC framework and then they ended up using struts but they are misusing it. The same incident happened for Hibernate and then spring frameworks. My point is :
Not everything that sounds complicated is beautifull and extensible, this software lacks quality.

Portal Server development is not waste of time
If I were to develop a portal server, I'd choose a more modern approach, develop less code(less than 600 spring beans!!!). And I would try to think in an un-chiniese way. It can be wise to choose a good license for an open source portal. If you like JSR-168, be aware that untalented chinese charge their customers more than 70000$ a year for their junk support.