I honestly don't know too much about Java and its technologies outside of a general understanding of it. I specifically chose to stay out of the Java ecosystem

I honestly don't know too much about Java and its technologies outside of a general understanding of it. I specifically chose to stay out of the Java ecosystem years ago because I disliked the Java community as a whole. They had a real beef with C and C++ being more performant and constantly pushed and railed against both C and C++ to the point of being what I considered completely divorced from reality. Java as a tech is strong, but Java as a community was full of pretentious assholes who had a complex about performance (in my opinion of course). I have no doubt your example was most likely due to some technical issue preventing hotspot from doing what it should have. When hotspot can do it's work it's amazing, you just have to enable it, and you're right about doing arcane things to get performance. That's true in any GC'd language though, even .Net has it's boogeymen.