The problem you describe may be an issue with checked exceptions but it would equally be one in any language with the aforementioned feature.

> We're not going to handle each of those cases differently, if we were going to we could always catch the specific exception type explicitly.

But you don't have to handle them differently. You can though and your method signatures will tell you what type of errors you might have to deal with. Some make sense to handle on the spot others don't.

You don't get that with runtime only exceptions. With those you really don't know and can get all kinds of errors and so you expect all and then just catch all and deal with it or blow up/abort whatever is going on (which let's be honest is what most web services do). Is that good? Yeah, sometimes. It certainly is easier to do that instead of thinking about possible failure modes when you know you'll only end up logging the error and give up anyway. I'm not trying to be cheeky, it really is overkill to make full use of checked exception in some cases.

Granted I haven't seen many great examples of checked exception usages so far but I wouldn't dismiss them because they don't mesh with what you're used to or with what's common in a given domain.