Well, yes — the problem is that the JVM was too big and too platform-independent. We don't want JVM everywhere; really, we want POSIX-everywhere. The JVM's also this weird level of statically-typed hyper-extensibility — it's Greenspun's Tenth Law in action, and the result is typically in really terrible taste. The end result is a JVM which is really, really impressive, but appallingly ugly.