I wish they would focus on making the underlying platform and bytecode more amenable to all the other, non-Java languages like Scala that compile to JVM bytecode. The real value is in the highly optimized, stable, and performant underlying JVM platform. If it was easier to create languages like Scala that were "compatible" with Java codebases and had the primitives they require in the underlying platform, then that would lead to an incredible amount of innovation I think. Nobody really cares that Java (on the language syntax level) is going to add some features in 5-10 years that other langs already had 10 years ago, that is ridiculous.