Regardless of other warts with the language, I really love how the Java Language Specification lays down the law.
Java bugs need to stay there because if they were fixed then it would be a backward incompatible change.
I don't get it... the Java way seems pretty right to me. That said, I will allow that they might have been a little bit too rigid about not allowing breaking changes. At the very least this policy has resulted in Java evolving more slowly than it might have otherwise. But I don't necessarily find that to be unacceptable, all things told.
In my experience the Java way is 'oh, a bug, well, that's a bug defined in the spec so we can't fix it now, we'll make a note for the next version'...5 years pass.
The 'I don't want to touch working code' argument is another strange Javaism. If you expect your code to not rot your going to have to constantly maintain it anyway.
x = null;
typeof x; //object
x.a = 1; //TypeError: x is nullJava's language spec exists, I'll give it that. Well designed? It was when it was created but, it has evolved very poorly. Look at C# as an example of what a similar language designed at a similar time could become while still being 'Enterprise'.