I see. I tend to agree in principle. I felt this with julia for example and it put me off a bit even though I was very keen on it at first In the specific case

I see. I tend to agree in principle. I felt this with julia for example and it put me off a bit even though I was very keen on it at first In the specific case of java however I don't think this applies much; the vast majority of improvements are aimed at under the hood optimisations rather than syntax. And I feel that any changes in syntax have been quite incremental, intuitive, and reasonable. AND they stay around as preview features forever, so this may inflate the perception of features entering the language, when in fact it's the same one feature being mildly iterated on. E.g. the main syntactical change in this version seems to be the use of primitives in switch statements, which was already discussed for a while, and is itself a meaningful change brought about by the introduction of switch expressions.