Like I said, I know the history and why it exists. I learned Java before 1.5 came out. That API existed long before generics did (I think 1.0 or earlier). If they had designed the language with generics in mind, they would have probably done it differently; hindsight is 20/20. Doesn't make it not a suboptimal API. I don't think there's a good way to fix it this late in the game without breaking old code, but such are the warts of backwards compatibility.