Generics can be easy to use, but they are never easy to implement at the library level for programmers. I don't think that they are really useful for VM languages, except for type safety. I agree that C++ STL could not have been implemented easily (or at least in a manner that would allow to use them easily) without templates, but templates are hard to understand when you need to develop libraries using them.
So for me I'm using Java generic a lot, but as a user of the collections library (which is the main area were they are useful IMHO, and in every language), and I'm perfectly OK with that. When using generics like that, they are very easy to understand. See this example:
public Map<String, String> getMap() {
...
}
It is a really cool here to know what is returned by the method, and also to be sure that types mistakes on the content of the Map will be detected at compile time.
