Are there too many Java frameworks?

There's a conservative streak running through Java advocacy lately. Not politically conservative, but in the dictionary definition of "holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation". There seem to be a lot of developers in our community resistant to some of the proposals for changes in the Java 7 time-frame. This is something of a trend that followed the major changes of Java 5 (generics, annotations, enumerated types), though what initially appeared to be a reflexive "buyer's remorse" over generics seems to be more than that -- for every blogger saying generics should be torn out of the language, you can find another saying that Java needs to go further and have fully reified generics.

Still, the conservative voices are making themselves heard. Check out the current poll results. Asked "Which proposed language change would you most like to see in Java 7," the voters' current preference is "I don't want any language changes," ahead of all eight specific proposals. Of course, this could change by the time the poll closes on Friday. More importantly, there's a rollicking discussion on the poll results page. Some posts ask for language changes other than the options listed in the poll, while others say "leave well enough alone", such as jwenting, who writes:

For Java 7, lets just get rid of the marketing team that drives the language development and take the chance to actually get rid of a lot of garbage. Things like StringTokenizer, Vector, and everything deprecated.

And get rid of all the idiots proposing to add everything and the kitchen sink to the language "because Ruby has it" (or insert someone's favourite language) which is all the reason anyone's ever really come up with for such idiocies as closures, operator overloading, properties, multiple inheritance, embedded SOAP stacks and database servers, and just about everything else added since 1.4