Ten years ago I did not know who Guy Steele was or that I would spend years programming in Java. Seven years ago I thought that a language without operator overloading and templates was an ugly toy. A few years later I got so used to it I mostly stopped worrying.
It turns out Java authors were not morons. They might have thought that the users of their language were. Or they just could not imagine that a language for programming refrigerators (or was it set top boxes?) would be of any wider use. What is painful to learn in hindsight is that they knew about all the good suff , liked it a lot themselves but somehow chose to ignore it.