[spaetzleesser]

I think the first part of a standard lib is pretty straightforward to design. String operations, math, standard protocols, I/O are petty well understood. It gets more tricky once you get to higher levels abstraction like UI.

[makapuf]

Nio and streams API show that even those were not evident from the beginning of java.

[imoverclocked]

> ... pretty straightforward to design. String operations ...

Tell that to Haskell.

Also, I've seen some pretty gnarly use of String in Java.