[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.