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these are just the tip of the iceberg of what you missing when coming from C# going to Java. Lambad, LINQ and var please!

Have you considered Scala? Same platform, but a much more modern and expressive language.

Agreed. Even when I have to write Java these days (you can't write Hive serdes in Scala), I wrap it in an SBT project and write all my tests in Specs2. (See e.g. https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/tree/master/3-etl/hive-...)