I've found things like Lombok and LambdaJ to be super helpful as far as verbosity. One thing that does frustrate me is that the compiler enforces a target byte

I've found things like Lombok and LambdaJ to be super helpful as far as verbosity. One thing that does frustrate me is that the compiler enforces a target bytecode level at least as high as your source version. Meaning that even the simpler syntax for initializing generics isn't allowed even though it's pure syntactic sugar and has no impact on the generated bytecode.