A major cleanup of the Java libraries is scheduled for Java 9. The JVM actually does not surprise anyone who's been working with it for a while: it is downright the most performant, flexible and awesome runtime environment ever developed. I've been playing around with lots of languages and environments in my pretty long career and, in the past decade, have always come back to Java (or the JVM). It feels like driving a Ferrari where everything else is at best a Toyota - might be easier to handle at first, but it's not your dream car.
This pattern, by the way, has been going on in lots of tech companies. They always end up going back to the JVM.
Aside from terrific performance, the JVM gives you the best concurrency platform out there (though not the easiest to use), cool and extremely useful capabilities like dynamic linking and bytecode instrumentation, and unparalleled monitoring and profiling tools. It's the most professional platform you can choose (unless you're limited to Windows, in which case .Net is also an option). It's so far ahead than anything else out there, that the competition can only beat it in very specific use cases (e.g. Go is much better at startup time as well as standalone packaging, and C has better performance, though mostly in single-threaded programs). But nothing else gives you the whole package of performance, flexibility, maturity and monitoring.