Java suffers from JSR approval hell just because it tries to stadardize everything. This is the requirement to perform well in the enterprise world, along with the programmers certification mechanism and inclusion of the top industry players in the standards approval.
If your language is just a hackers' toy (Clojure and Scala are exactly that) then why do you care about JSRs in the first place? The JSRs don't mention JVM usually, only the libraries or Java language extensions.
I agree with you that it should be possible to avoid much of the complexity of Java EE if you just use the JVM.
But one motivation for using a JVM based language in the first place is that so many libraries are available on that platform. Unfortunately, many of them suffer from excessive complexity and some of that complexity is due to the JCP.
Ruby community has its own traits. The "gem for Java" probably does not exist because not too much people need it (otherwise it would have been written already). In pure Java it's hard to use REPL, and you have to build your project anyway before running it, so maven suits better here.
Java suffers from JSR approval hell just because it tries to stadardize everything. This is the requirement to perform well in the enterprise world, along with the programmers certification mechanism and inclusion of the top industry players in the standards approval.
If your language is just a hackers' toy (Clojure and Scala are exactly that) then why do you care about JSRs in the first place? The JSRs don't mention JVM usually, only the libraries or Java language extensions.