[mcguire]

"Having written these numerous large, complex systems, I believe there are less than 10 instances where generics would've been super helpful."

If you wrote Python, you'd probably be saying, "there are less than 10 instances where type declarations..."; you could make similar statements about concurrency or a host of other features.

And you'd be more or less right.

Here's the deal: a language with generics is very different from a language without generics. You write different code, you solve problems differently, you think differently. This is why they should have had generics in version 1.0 and why adding them later seems so underwhelming to some of us. Generics have a lot of advantages, but you are going to be looking at a bizarre mixture of programming styles for a long time.