Designing around platform flaws can be worth it if there are commensurate benefits. You're very lucky if you've never had to do this, or perhaps just blind to the tradeoffs you were making.

That's like saying "we had to consider memory management" in a C++ system.

When you are designing a high performance system you have to consider everything. Different platforms have different tradeoffs, but the tradeoffs on the JVM have been well proven over time.