GNU Guix launches

Well, lots of people are "willing to pay the rather steep price" given the scale on which Java libraries and applications are distributed and acquired, and given the proliferation of various language-specific packaging mechanisms.

I find it odd that people don't want to let users install system packages in an unprivileged fashion but will entertain stuff like Apache Maven pulling hundreds of .jar files down from apache.org or some random mirror.

Instead of giving people access to a potentially limited selection of official packages, people probably go off and download all sorts of random things from the Internet instead. The readership here may be experts at finding the official upstream locations for software, but I suggest that they observe non-experts searching the Internet to see how the typical experience turns out.