You spend more time reading code that writing it. Optimising for the later is a mistake.
I guess the noticeable pushback against including generics was not unwarranted, people are just now starting to see the ripple effects we were warned about.
Generics are, IMO, necessary for even a semi-modern language. Okay, you don't need a turing complete templating sublanguage like C++, but you do need at least a way to take generic functions and create generic containers.
In application code you will almost never write generics. To me, it's always been a non-issue.
