1. The breaking of some libraries in JDK 9 had very little to do with modules and was mostly due to weak encapsulation. Almost all issues stemmed from libraries, written to be non-portable, hacking into JDK internals and becoming entangled with the particulars of JDK 8. When those internals changed, they broke. With modules' strong encapsulation now finally enabled, this won't happen again. In other words, modules weren't the cause of the breakages, but added to prevent them in the future. Unfortunately, they were blamed for the problems they were created to prevent because they were the most famous feature in JDK 9.
2. Modules are becoming the core of Java's security strategy. Without them, your code only does what you think it does unless any library decides it should do something else.
3. The reduction of security and maintenance concerns have already yielded tremendous dividends, as we the JDK developers have been freed to work on other stuff. Your complaint is like someone finally getting a fast internet connection, saying, all that noise and dirt of tearing up the street putting in the cable ducts have been in vain; they should have just given us fast internet, because that's all we wanted.
So, we've got better security and a drastic reduction in future breakages, all for negligible backward-incompatible changes to the spec.
2. Modules are becoming the core of Java's security strategy. Without them, your code only does what you think it does unless any library decides it should do something else.
3. The reduction of security and maintenance concerns have already yielded tremendous dividends, as we the JDK developers have been freed to work on other stuff. Your complaint is like someone finally getting a fast internet connection, saying, all that noise and dirt of tearing up the street putting in the cable ducts have been in vain; they should have just given us fast internet, because that's all we wanted.
So, we've got better security and a drastic reduction in future breakages, all for negligible backward-incompatible changes to the spec.