Way back when when the JVM/CLR were being originally designed, I'm not sure that Option types as a concept were quite as proven, and both languages were trying

Way back when when the JVM/CLR were being originally designed, I'm not sure that Option types as a concept were quite as proven, and both languages were trying to be "safe" languages that didn't have any complicated or new concepts in them. Optional types might not be that now, but they probably were then, when they were strictly in the domain of fairly academic languages.