imo it's worse than that. of they'd just hid the boxing in the runtime, Java would be a kind of slow language that didn't feel awful. by exposing the unboxed primitives to the user, they created a horrible duality of incompatible types.

You Guys haven’t used Java since the 90’s right? Boxed types convert to primitive values automatically, you never need an explicit cast! What horrible duality are you talking about?