I'm with you. We all have our preferences. Use whatever tools makes you feel more productive. Ideally all of your code should be language agnostic. An algorithm is an algorithm in any language. While developing programs I've found that coding itself takes the least amount of time, is figuring out the algorithms, overall architecture, and debugging that takes most of the time. The coding part is the easy part.

I do agree that Java has some junk in it, but you don't have to use it. I'm sure I could say the same thing about any language though. I still prefer Java though.