Java and C# simply have a lot of ceremony and features and that's not a bad thing. However, it's easy to miss the forest through the trees. Java is not bad at all nor is C# but there are so many more concepts in Java and C# that are unrelated to OO that it's easy to conflate Language conveniences and features with OO itself. Smalltalk is "stripped down OO". Both C# and Java are one interpretation of OO plus twenty years worth of other things added on top and that's not intended to be a criticism. If you start with a simpler and purer implementation of OO, what is OO, what is decidedly one languages interpretation of OO, and what has been added for other reasons will become more apparent. I've always found that developers who learned ST first were an order of magnitude better Java and C# developers than those who learned either of those first. Good luck with your learnings.