Comment by mrcrumb1

You can bikeshed in any language. Kotlin introduced a lot of optional syntactic sugar so that Java devs could choose their level of comfort with the language features. I don't really see this as a problem unless your devs are prone to this sort of bikeshedding (see: your use of "smells funny"). I've used kotlin for Android since right before it was officially supported and there has been almost no downside other than the occasional hiccup with Java/Kotlin nullability interop