[antonvs]

Java was released in Jan 1996, .NET in Feb 2002. A lot changed in those six years. .NET built on the shoulders of the giant that was Java, as well as the lessons from the globally accelerating development enabled by the internet.

Those early decisions may not have been technically right in some sense, but technical considerations are not the only factor.

[pjmlp]

Mesa/Cedar was developed at Xerox PARC in 1981 and is cited as one of Java's influences.

One of its descendants, Modula-3 designed around 1986, is equally cited as yet another Java reference.

Both of them, had value types and compiled ahead of time into native code. Although Mesa/Cedar was native in the Lisp Machine sense, given the Xerox PARC microcoded CPU architectures.

There are some old posts from Gosling where he discusses about Eiffel/Sather features.

So the knowledge was there, it was just a bit disappointing not getting them, because as you say technical considerations were not the only factor.