Your first paragraph is a fair encapsulation of what Java was intended to be from 1994: a mullet of a language that is deliberately unexciting at the language e

Your first paragraph is a fair encapsulation of what Java was intended to be from 1994: a mullet of a language that is deliberately unexciting at the language end, but brings in a number of (at the time exotic) features at the VM end. Things like GC, reflection, runtime loading of code, that were very familiar from more academic languages at the time.