…I spend time working on something under an [reasonable] assumption
that I can do X, spend some more time realizing that I actually cannot,
lots more on cranking out convoluted code for working around that limitation, and
then find
out that this X has in fact been implemented in a later release than
the one I have…

Here, the feature X is being able, upon an exit from
the method, get the value it returned. This feature is there in
JDK
1.6. I don’t need it anymore for now though… Maybe I will…