I both love and hate it. I love the high quality libraries and ecosystem, reasonable performance, simple semantics. I hate the annotations and reflection magic,

I both love and hate it. I love the high quality libraries and ecosystem, reasonable performance, simple semantics. I hate the annotations and reflection magic, bloated frameworks, type erasure, lack of null safety, build systems. Luckily, it is possible to avoid some of that by not jumping on the bandwagon's standard stack. Leave that framework on the shelf, and Just Write Java. Unfortunately, many existing Java projects you come across in the wild are trainwrecks.