I agree with your points, but would like to add another one: runtime generic type erasure needs to go. Whether it is through reification or some other means, I don't care, but it feels like every single time I sit down to write some solid core-of-the-program basic code, I run up against erasure.
It's probably not every time, but you get the point.
That said, I think that Java 8 is in a good state, and I really liked its improvements. For Java 9, the new modularization system seems interesting, and I'll be happy to ditch classpaths!
