Imagine if all of those years of saying that it was just laziness causing people not to like Maven, massive object hierarchies, or repeating claims about JIT performance which statistically represented no application anyone actually used had instead translated into “There are a ton of basic gaps which give every new user a bad first impression. We should do something about that!”. Repeat for “Maybe it was a really bad idea re-inventing PHP-style typing with introspection so you have all of the inconvenience of static types but still commonly find type-confusion problems which editors and the compiler won't tell you about”, “Maybe it isn't reasonable to tell people that you normally need to edit multiple XML and properties files to run anything more than hello world”, or “Maybe we should burn with fire any codebase which thinks the right way to handle an error is to permanently stop working but still keep running so anything which doesn't do an end-to-end health-check won't know all of your users see the service as down”.
It may sound a bit bitter but I'm saying that as someone who started using Java circa 1995, left to more productive shores, and recently came back to a new development team seeing that nothing seems to have changed in terms of the amount of time developers spend fighting the tools rather than doing their jobs. Yes, Java code can have competitive performance (Solr/ElasticSearch are world-class) but the code I see is more commonly slower than Python while using more memory and lines of code because it turns out that even heroic attempts at JIT optimization can be easily defeated by the average enterprise Java architecture.