I think it turned into modern day COBOL as soon as J2EE came out.

And I wonder if it's inevitable. I wonder whether any language that successfully plays in that space will necessarily suffer the same fate.

Really I think the best thing for Java at this point is getting it out of Oracle's greedy clutches. They are debasing the ecosystem of the language as a whole at this point.

I'd love to see the Java community fork OpenJDK and just leave Oracle behind. I wonder if the licensing of OpenJDK makes this possible? If so, the only (albiet huge) problem is getting a critical mass of support behind one particular effort.