I don't deny that. What adds to complexity more than verbosity, though, is that Java's lack of abstraction facilities leads to the overuse of frameworks, including byte code manipulation and excessive reflection. At that point it can get really obscure.

But you can write straighforward Java, and on average reading someone elses Java code is easier than reading typical C++ code for instance. I don't have experience with reading other people's Scala code but it seems similar to C++.