I actually like Javascript. Aside from all the little warts, the only real problem I see is garbage collection and how easy it is to leak memory. OO does take a little more work, and it'd be nice if modules/dependencies were baked in, but IMO JS passes the Larry Wall test: Easy things are easy, and hard things are possible.

Doing simple JavaScript is easy. Doing JavaScript well, that scales and doesn't become a spaghetti mess is _hard_.

Having said that, there are a tonne of libraries and tools which make it much better these days. A language is only as good as the available libraries and there are some really good ones on npm.

What, particulary, do you find problematic?

JavaScript is a powerful seductress, I've fallen for her many times. I remember writing a js web server and web application framework when rhino came out. It was an awesome thing at first since I could turn tons of java code into one liners easily, but as my app grew over the several thousand line mark it became more of a hassle to find and remember the apis i was creating in this white fire of code genesis. Finally I started getting angry everytime I had to lookup my new methods for stuff and I said f this, tooling > *. My pace went to zero as code size increased, but with Java if anything it increases or at the very least stays constant. JS is great for my personal site and small projects, but if someone gave me 1 million and said build an app that you can iterate on that would be potentially huge for purpose X, I would use java.

Still though, I stare longingly into JS's eyes when she looks my way...

This is clearly the case with me, yes, since one can't really avoid JS.

Yep people can't like a language because you haven't figured it out.