This brings up a general question. Why all the 'final' classes? Is it a performance trick? Personally I would trade a little performance to have all the classes open to inheritance. More liberal use of public and protected would also be appreciated.
Final declarations made some things faster in old versions of the java compiler, but that is no longer the case.
On the other hand, we can't just remove all final declarations, nor make everything public: many things are private and/or final because they are not designed to be subclassed or overridden. Once something is public its implementation cannot be as easily changed without breaking back-compatibility, slowing development. So we should be careful to only make public things whose API we don't expect to change.
If you have particular methods and classes which you believe are overly protected, then please make a specific proposal.
Doug
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