The same could be said about Ruby and it's relationship to Perl and Python. It has cultural roots in those languages, but is often regarded to be better rather than worse. (As a die-hard Perl developer I disagree, but I don't hold a grudge.) All three are also considered to be C-like languages too, and they don't suffer the problems Java has.
One could argue that Java's problem was that it was designed for programming VCRs, DVD players, and Cable-TV boxes, and similar equipment, but the got stretched and pulled into environments it just wasn't ready for. That, plus Sun's hyper-aggressive marketing machine to turn Java into the language-for-everything, created the beast that it has become.
My personal view is that Sun turned Java into a programming language for charge-by-the-hour consultants. The culture of over-engineering exists because it takes a lot more time to design software that way, more time and larger teams to implement software that way, and specialized hard-to-transfer knowledge to maintain that kind of software. This all benefits the consultants and hurts the companies paying for the software to be built, which only makes sense if Sun was intentionally pushing Java that way.
I wouldn't describe C# as a language that I like, but I think it too has benifited from breaking the mold of C more than Java did (though I attribute most of it's superiority to its designers simply making better decisions in several places). Named and optional arguments stand out in my mind as ways C# did something that had no precedence in C, while Java still has not. (There is that double squiggly bracket trick, but you have to admit that is pretty shoddy).
Or more accurately, the problem is that Java was a new language shoehorned into being "like" a language that was never meant to hold the concepts that Java demands. In some cases this manifests itself in more syntactical ways; C's pragmatic but unsophisticated approach typing works well for C, but starts to become a real burden when you start adding more sophisticated concepts onto the language. (Were generics really a concept that were ever appropriate for something like C? Generics deserve a more considered treatment; a language with structure and syntax designed with them in mind.) In other cases the impact is more clear but inexplicable; "In Java Everything is an Object"(tm)... except for the things that are not.
The end result is a language that is ugly and clumsy to work with without some pretty advanced tooling, all for reasons that really have no business being real problems. Shameful (primarily cosmetic) flaws forced upon Java by the business decision: "make it reminiscent of C".
I have the same complaint about C++. Had Java and C++ not burdened themselves with the design requirement of looking like C, they would be much better languages. Languages that stray further from the mold, like Scala or Go (I am thinking particularly of their abandonment of C inspired defines, in favor of a more Pascal approach), are more pleasant to work with for it. Perhaps this damages adoption.. but that is another matter I think.