> Tail recursion can be easily inlined, however it is my understanding that the Java creators specifically chose not to implement this, as it makes resultant code hard to debug (if not impossible).

That has always been a strange argument. You can turn features on and off, so the "it's hard to debug" argument doesn't make sense. Scala added @tailrec and I don't think I've ever heard complaints about it. Clojure has recur. Both are JVM languages.