Personally, I think one of my favorite things about Java is that, all things considered, it's a small-ish language. So I'm glad that Java is both willing to evolve (slowly, letting other people try stuff out first) but also clearly focused on a curated feature set and resistant to letting new stuff in to bloat it. I am very happy to deal with minor things like no multiline string support if it means we get to avoid being a terrible mess of language features that ruby, scala, python, etc have accrued in a relatively quicker timescale.
I was fairly sad around the java 6-7 days where we went quite a long time with no visibly major new language features (diamond inference was 7's big thing, lol). So it is nice that we're moving a bit faster than that, now.