I think part of the problem is that from where I stand, there's no way to tell my programming language (java) "Hey, this thing doesn't need horsepower so prefer to schedule it on little cores." Or conversely "Hey, this thing is CPU sensitive, don't put it on a LITTLE core."

I don't think (but could be wrong) that C++ has a platform independent way of doing this either. I'm not even sure if such an API is exposed from the Windows or linux kernel (though I'd imagine it is).

That to me is the bigger issue here. I can specify which core a thread should run on, but I can't specify what type of core it should run on.