Technically speaking, it's hard for me to take anything away from Java, other than critiquing the object-oriented nature (Kingdom of Nouns) and some of the syntax. You can certainly build amazing things in Java.

That said, sometimes life is just based on a feeling that may not always be perfectly rational.

For me, Java feels like it represents a hell of a lot of shitty businesses that I don't want to be associated with. If there's a stereotypical shitty mid-size corporation out there that engages in shitty behavior and manipulates the H1B system and views programmers as fungible cogs and works on the most boring banal shit out there, you know almost without looking at them that they're a Java shop. There's no part of that universe that I want to be a part of. The only thing that made me want to take a half-look at any part of the Java ecosystem for future work is Clojure.