I don't know about that. Bloat bothers me, but it has benefits too. Why is C++ so successful? Because it contains a lot of features. Ask random C++ developers

I don't know about that. Bloat bothers me, but it has benefits too. Why is C++ so successful? Because it contains a lot of features. Ask random C++ developers what their favorite feature of C++ is and you will get a very wide spectrum of answers. I see Java libraries a bit like this: they are not liked because of the number of features they have but because I definitely need some of these features, and as long as I can use them without having to understand the rest of the library, I'm good. Guava is a very good example of this: an assortment of convenience functions from a very wide range of domains that you can use without ever having to read or understand the entire Guava documentation. Having small libraries is pretty much a guarantee for subtle bugs because the author went for the 80%/20% approach and then moved on to the next project. Joda is a good example of that: time libraries are extremely difficult to get right, and yet getting them right is absolutely critical. I will gladly pay the price of including the entire Joda library in my application even if I use 10% of it just for the certainty that it's battle tested, something I very much doubt the collection of libraries presented here does.