What's even sadder is that was built and Sun fought against it because they were worried that devs would only compile for Win32.

The trouble there is that Sun was right about that.

Doing it that way works great for open source where anyone can recompile the software for a new target, but for proprietary software they would have given you a Windows blob and that's about it.

Meanwhile the problems with Java were mostly not the JVM. Its current problem is, of course, Oracle.