May I guess you're either some old Lisp/Smalltalk etc veteran, or, much more probably, someone who entered IT after, say 2005?
Because back in the day very few thought of Java as "gross" -- it was greeted as a welcome change from the existing landscape which at its best was something like C++.
I guessed so, because back in the day (1995-early 00's) most devs outside of seasoned functional etc veterans (who were extremely few) or hardcore systems guys, saw Java in mostly positive light, and never considered it "boring" back then.
The change (for new devs to consider Java "boring" and lacking in features) happened sometime after 2005, with Rails entering, Javascript catching up, C# getting more features with 2.0 and 3.0.
(Consider than back then Scala, Go, Clojure et al weren't even started, and AJAX had just been made mainstream).
The point is, plenty of companies manage to create very good production software with Go, without generics. I didn't mean to rest my argument on my personal anecdote. You can look to Google, CloudFlare, SoundCloud, Dropbox, etc. for reassurance.
If you have a suggestion on how generics would fit into Go, I think the Go team would be happy to read your thoughts: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/golang-nuts.