I'll counter that with saying that j.u.l is not actually that bad, IMO, although I might be the only one in the world that thinks that. I always just choose j.u.l in my projects because it works well-enough. I just shim anything with slf4j if it speaks log4j or commons-logging (shudder).

Perhaps Sun should have just adopted slf4j and a simple console-logging stub, but I don't think j.u.l is really any worse than the alternatives -- only a different implementation.

Now date APIs: those do suck, but I think the new Date JSR will finally get things to a place where we can use Java Dates rather than Joda.