java without sucking? Myth or Magic?

/prog/ I am learning java at university, and there seems to be a religiously followed doctrine that OOP is brilliant and that all problems should be put into an OOP system.

to summarise my grimaces:
-terrible ontology for classes
-everything must become an object and have a class and factory (i.e. overzealous use of OOP)
-everything relies on try catch throw statements to fix the 10's of problems that just inventing an object creates
-nothing beautiful, nothing simple, and definitely nothing fast to write, compile or execute.

Now for questions.
1. is it possible to make elegant, good, maintainable code in Java?

2. Challenge mode, is it possible for that code to work with everyone elses' OOP bullshit?

For instance could one simplify programs down to a single class, then for the required OOP methods and classes just call to the arrays etc in that class?
i.e. make the package/program behave as expected for any other class/driver using it, but not use OOP for the code.

3. Will the introduction of lambda expressions in java SE 8 make life better?

4. Should I quit this course before the cancer grows on me and I have to work to scrub it from my mind?

>>3
Thanks, I think I'll keep at it then. My university has a placement program with quite a few firms so that will ease the pain of getting a job. Doing a double degree with management which broadens the horizons considerably. In most uni courses people apparently only use 10% of what they learn in their job, so I suppose it's fine if I forget all the java stuff in order to program in something else.

>>7
I doubt that, it has a lot more to do with job prospects. We learned FIOC for one semester, as a primer to programming and problem solving.
Then it was straight into Java, which honestly felt like learning a ``how to use Java manual'' rather than learning to program- more about structure than problem solving.
I suppose that's precisely what businesses want- code that slots together with all the other people's code, all documented in the same way. It does make more jobs and work for programmers, that's for sure.
That said, if I were a project manager I probably would use other languages over it (something that weeds the average programmers out).

I doubt many fully understand OOP in the class let alone how to use it well - but it's still early days in the course (have only done one year).