I can appreciate most of this. I would disagree somewhat with development speed, but initial development speed, yea. It's not rails, or even perl frameworks the last time I used them.

You definitely can't compare it to things like Go nowadays, but it would take a lot to convince me you couldn't tune it to perform extremely well. I think things like Jersey really help cut down on code bloat, in comparison to things like Spring. Lots of companies (including mine) latch on to the "...and the kitchen sink" mantra and go with Spring when Jersey can do the job with half the code and dependencies.

I can't necessarily speak to garbage collection because my understanding is while it's improved in 8, it is still extremely ass compared to C# (which, we wouldn't be having this conversation if it had a better battle tested runtime on linux), but there are supposed to be good things coming in 9.

Anyway, I guess my main point with all this is that Java isn't this bloated beast everyone often thinks it is, and is at least very good middle ground for a solid, sturdy language choice that isn't going to have a lot of issues unless you make some really stupid architecture and development decisions.