Maybe we're seeing different sides of the language then. I'm doing a lot of integer-list sorting, building a search engine in java. I'm evenly split between Arrays.sort or GNU Trove's specialized primitive collections.

The overhead of List<Integer> really can not be overstated, it can approach order 1000% memory consumption, speed is prima facie about half for dealing with collections, but in practice it can be much lower from the GC churn. Even for lists as small as a million entries this can be quite untenable.