> Why abuse .class files for data storage

The only alternative is to have the data in a separate file, which needs to be available, read in, and parsed. .NET/CLR provides a mechanism to bake large objects into the assembly and I don't see that as abusive. It's way more convenient when you can treat the object as being “just there”.

Well, jars can have resource files included - I would say this is a more-than-solved problem.