What you've written sounds like a criticism of the JVM data analytics ecosystem (the Java Parquet library in particular) and not Apache Arrow itself. Parquet for Java is an independent open source project and developer community. For example, you said
> It's barely useable and the dependencies are horrific - the whole thing is mingled with hadoop dependencies - even the API itself.
For C++ / Python / R many of the developers for both Apache Arrow and Apache Parquet are the same and we currently develop the Parquet codebase out of the Arrow source tree.
So, I'm not sure what to tell you, we Arrow developers cannot take it upon ourselves to fix up the whole JVM data ecosystem.
> It's barely useable and the dependencies are horrific - the whole thing is mingled with hadoop dependencies - even the API itself.
These are comments about http://github.com/apache/parquet-mr which is a different open source project.
For C++ / Python / R many of the developers for both Apache Arrow and Apache Parquet are the same and we currently develop the Parquet codebase out of the Arrow source tree.
So, I'm not sure what to tell you, we Arrow developers cannot take it upon ourselves to fix up the whole JVM data ecosystem.