Innovation loses to taking small steps to improve the worse alternative. Community is built around tinkering and fixing errors, getting around design failures.
Java was a pretty major clean break when it came out. It was probably right at the limit of what could be done innovation-wise whilst still being targeted at the mainstream.
Also agreed: Java and JVM are were not the "worse is better" options at the time of adoption. Hype alone did not create the massive shift to Java that occurred in late 90s. It was a genuinely positive development for the practice and people were getting results. It was Java's 2nd act of moving into "enterprise" (and Sun's mismanagement of that effort) that created its current sense of 'heaviness' of language.
The reason I always hated Java was because it was designed by good programmers for bad programmers in a looking down at them way, not a good programmers for themselves to use.
btw. Java design team licensed the Oberon compiler sources years before to study it.
The code has been available for years before Oak was born, it is even on the book.
Not only were CORBA and DCOM much worse, Java EE was the reboot of Objective-C framework for distributed computing at Sun. And those Objective-C lengthy methods are quite the pleasure to type without code completion.
While they certainly could have done better, it was already an huge improvement.