Yeah, I honestly was surprised they did end up eventually getting generics. My brief stint with it ended a while before then, but my impression at the time was

Yeah, I honestly was surprised they did end up eventually getting generics. My brief stint with it ended a while before then, but my impression at the time was that they were bizarrely insistent on trying to come up with a design from first principles rather than taking the time to understand the literal decades of designs that came before. It was impossible for me to tell the difference between their position and "we don't like Java generics and are either not aware of languages like ML or are too arrogant to read about them".