How so? Performance? Reliability? Verbosity? Which language is suitable in your opinion?

To me this kind of opinion-based... um, opinions... fly in the face of evidence. Java has been used for more than a decade to deploy business software to great success. What more evidence does one need? It'd be like arguing "COBOL is unsuitable for banking".

In the meantime, opinions have shifted on best engineering practices, and Java has naturally run the gamut of all these opinions. And because there are tons of Java systems, there's no shortage of examples of failed/bad projects one could pick on. I wonder how many languages/platforms would have fared better...

What I mean is that I think using Java meant the company was required to spend more resources than should have been necessary to accomplish their goal.

BTW, when I say "Java", I mean the language, not the platform. Java-the-platform is very suitable to business software. Java-the-language, less so. Java OOP brings with it a ridiculous amount of incidental complexity, boilerplate, and impedance mismatches. Of course you can make it work, I do it every day. I just think it's a poor choice. It's certainly not the worst choice, and the platform + available libraries is definitely a plus.

And as I mentioned in my original post, there are way to make it more suitable through various hacks (like Lombok) and libraries, but other languages are more suitable out of the box (including other JVM languages).