If I need to install the JVM just to try your software, then it's going to remain untried - however many design patterns you've managed to cram into it.
Because it's too big, it's very slow to start, it's controlled by a company that is not very lovely, it's not installed by default on our system, it's free and opensource without in fact being very libre, it has frequent security flaws that don't seem to be addressed seriously... Some of this is probably only partially true, but it gives you an idea why people don't want to use it, whether they're right or wrong.
So it's a good thing you're propagating partial truths then, right?
The JVM isn't easy to beat for software that's more complicated than "Hello World". Sure you can beat it, but you're going to have to work very, very hard.
The security flaws exist in the area few people care about (and shouldn't even really be installed any more) -- the sandboxing and web start code.
Did you include gcc and friends in your "too big" calculations? Hard to program without them.
It's a crazy moving target that never seems to work right. Even if it does work right, pretty soon some update breaks it. And then there's the fact that most (desktop) Java applications look like arse and run like a dog.
Java aficionados don't seem to realise just how obnoxious many of us find the JVM. If you live with it, and do your work with it, I guess you come to accept it as a fact of life - always there in the background. If literally nothing that you do uses it, then it's a massive extra dependency to add to a simple desktop app - a dependency that is often quite difficult to manage and keep updated.
Re dependency: you probably have a point on Windows, but it's your choice to use an OS without a package manager to keep things up to date. I don't know about Mac but on Linux it is a non issue.
That said it does not do well for desktop apps due to slow startup, high memory use and lack of native toolkit. It does much better as a server side runtime.
Of these, I have only tried Eclipse. While certainly more full-featured out of the box, its speed, especially at startup, is really nothing to boast about when compared to Visual Studio.
