As someone who was deeply involved with Java a decade ago, I feel your pain over the "hijacking." In truth, that crowd would have hijacked anything that came their way, it is a dynamic strongly influenced by the BigCo culture, it isn't really a tool thing.

The moment you set up "throw it over the wall" processes where architects are rewarded for architecture and implementors are blamed for bugs, you are going down the road to something that looks like J2EE no matter where you start.