Consistency is important, but effectiveness is, by my lights, moreso. Java's biggest problem isn't the language, which is sad, but its type system, and I've yet to see a newer alternative JVM language with a type system remotely worth discussing. (Which isn't to say it doesn't exist, but it sure isn't Ceylon or Kotlin.)
Omitting dots and parens is so superficial that you could change the code purely mechanically to your preferred style. Just like running an autoformatter on someone's code before reading it because you don't like their indentation style.
Could you give an example of what you consider a more consistent JVM language? I find Scala is often more consistent, because it uses a small number of powerful features. E.g. Kotlin doesn't have Scala's implicits - so it instead has a bunch of different special-case features (e.g. extension methods) to replicate their use cases.
I can't say I've followed Kotlin all that closely, but it struck me as a less dense language. Ceylon is a language I've followed closely, and I find it very consistent.