Being excited about Java is like being excited about dirt—not any particular dirt, just dirt in general. Yes, practically everything that grows grows in dirt, and anybody can walk on dirt, and in a pinch you can throw it at people or dig a hole and crawl in. Dirt.
Java was designed by people who had absolutely no intention or desire to ever use it. They cribbed parts from other languages they didn't really understand, and changed details in ways that make no sense on their own, or with other things they changed for actual reasons.
Their estimation of its expected users was very low, so they made everything dull and squishy so nobody could do much harm whether by mistake or deliberately.
It got billions of dollars more hype than it deserved on merit. Its privileged place in the corporate world, like its good tooling support, are direct products of that hype. The hype it got on first release, beyond the (very large amount of) money backing it, comes from a peculiar twist of history: right then, millions of programmers were sharecropping on Microsoft's plantation, and saw Java as their 40 acres and a mule. It was a balky mule, but it promised freedom from switching to a whole new app framework literally every 2nd year.
Since then, a very large number of libraries have been made to package most common operations. It's barely adequate for making libraries, but people have put a great deal of effort in because of the big user base.
"I enjoyed programming in Java, and being relieved of the responsibility for producing a quality product.":
http://blog.plover.com/prog/Java.html>