Expressive does not always mean "unnecessary clever", having less boilerplate is enormous advantage by itself. Consider that java until very recently didn't even have lambda expressions.

You might say: but IDEs help with boilerplate! True to a point. Someone still has to sift through the tons of unnecessary generated LOC crap just to get to the issue at hand.

Again, I'm not writing this to bash on java, I'm simply trying to show that search for "holy grail of programming languages" is far from fruitless, and it fills me with joy when I see more languages being developed and tried in different niches (clojure, rust, go, elixir — these are all different and awesome at the same time).