Back in the day, it was very common among Java programmers to consider using ?: as atrocious style. It was a relic from C, eccentric and therefore confusing, just more damage inflicted on the language through the influence of conservative programmers who didn't "get" Java. Since most Java programmers were monolingual and learned from books that relegated ?: to a few sentences inserted somewhere for completeness, many didn't even recognize it as an operator.

Even setting aside my love for the ?: operator, I never understood that attitude. One of the major selling points of Java in the early days was that it was simple enough for everyone to understand pretty completely. It was supposed to be impossible for a guru to write code that a junior programmer couldn't understand at the small scale with some effort, line-by-line, if not at the large scale. Training programmers to be competent at only a subset of the language undermined the purpose of having such a simple language.