"The memory footprint on Solaris machines is rather large, it appears."

The stupid engineers are thinking like engineers again. It is probably to Sun's benefit for Java to be bloated on Sun boxes. Sun is mostly a hardware company. Bloated software == hardware sales.

So, those naive engineers should shut up and be glad they still have a job. Sun does not make much money on Java.

The biggest lesson that I have yet to fully learn: "Go with the flow, even if the flow is stupid."