Clearcase is 100% to blame here. It made assumptions and the world changed.
And when it changed... Clearcase did not degrade gracefully. It was a full on collapse.
And when it changed... Clearcase did not degrade gracefully. It was a full on collapse.
Clearcase assumptions still worked for C/C++.
Clearcase could also act in the way svn, PVCS and CVS did with a checkout to a local disk and that way there would not have been the issues the OP talks about. (We did that for some projects not because of Java but because we were on Windows). Clearcase was still useful as it had good merging and easy branching 10 years before git.
After git and mercurial came out then yes Clearcase was not worth the money and collapsed.