You need to be more specific before what you say here has any weight. "some Java systems"? Do you even know what these are, or whether they even support Java well enough to deal with Tomcat or ant or any other serious, recent java application?
I think there's ORP, GCJ, Kaffee and maybe one other Java in main. I do not know if ant runs on them, because all ant distributions that I have seen seem to be set up to want the Sun JDK, including the one in contrib. I do not know ant well enough to change that and I have insufficient time and motive to learn about ant just now. It would be wonderful if someone who does know ant can enumerate the problems and make them available to the people who know those implementations. Surely getting ant into Debian matters to someone capable of that?
"I have heard that blah is a particular irritation", without any particular reasons, other than "it's irritating"? Is it irritating because it doesn't work, or because it's in contrib, or because of how the dependencies are set up, or what?
Basically, it seemed very difficult for them to install on a stock Debian system. I speculate that this is because contrib is not as well-integrated or -tested as main. I think it gives a very bad impression to users to present such software on Debian mirrors.
Charging into battle without adequate armor isn't a good idea. :)
Battle metaphors are not helpful to this discussion. Please try to collaborate if you wish to help. If not, just state your complaint.
-- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know. Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ slef@jabber.at Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/