I just counted the projects on the page provided. That said, the Java culture does tend to encourage hypermodularisation so what would be one project in another language could turn into several in Java.

Some of them are a bit odd:

http://projects.apache.org/projects/commons_chain.html

Others have really, really buzzwordy descriptions:

http://projects.apache.org/projects/rave.html

> the Java culture does tend to encourage hypermodularisation so what would be one project in another language could turn into several in Java.

I guess it depends what you're comparing to, but I think of Java projects as more monolithic. Spring does dozens of different things compared to something like say Flask. And particularly in Haskell or Javascript you seem to need 100 tiny libraries to do anything.

What's odd about an implementation of the Chain of Command?

Design patterns are usually integrated into software projects, not themselves a software project.

It depends on what's been spun off as a separate top-level project.

Does it have its own subdomain on apache.org? Then it's a top-level project.

It's not uncommon for projects to start as subprojects and then get upgraded to the top level, and some of them came out of Hadoop. For example, Avro started out as a Hadoop subproject before becoming its own top-level project.