A hoarder may have much more furniture than I do, but if I buy a sofa it doesn't mean I'm trying to catch up to the hoarder (who has five). Java isn't trying to catch up for the simple reason that we don't want it to have all the features Kotlin does; in fact, we're trying very hard to avoid that (not to mention that we have yet to adopt a single Kotlin feature; our features usually take a different form, even though Kotlin, Java, and many other languages often rely on the same inspiration, which is usually the ML language). That's because some languages aim to be feature-rich while others aim to be more minimal. Both are likely to accumulate features over time, but at very different rates (we'll hold off on features for years until we're satisfied that their value justifies the added complexity to the language, as keeping that relatively low is very important to us).

If you like a richer language, the Java platform offers you options, but many people prefer smaller languages (the number of Java Platform developers who use the Java language has remained pretty much at a constant ~90% for the past 15 or more years), but we're aware that a non-tiny minority of developers prefer richer languages, and so we accommodate them, too. Either way, 95% of the JDK is runtime (standard library and the JVM) and tooling, and you'll enjoy it regardless of which frontend language you prefer.

> Both are likely to accumulate features over time, but at very different rates (we'll hold off on features for years until we're satisfied that their value justifies the added complexity to the language, as keeping that relatively low is very important to us).

This strategy will still navigate Java into a random local optimum like it happened with other languages (that value backward compatibility), just more slowly. The greedy algorithm does that. Even if you do it slowly and you are extra careful that each step indeed betters the language.