Sorting arrays of primitives ought to be nearly as frequent as the need for sorted arrays of primitives due to the downright comical overhead of List<Integer>, but sorting arrays of objects has be rare in Java code written this millennium.
I mean I don't sort List<Integer> more than once in a blue moon either. I'm much more likely to either be sorting a list of model objects with a comparator, or manipulating a collection of objects that's already been sorted by some external source.
In the unlikely event that I'm modeling something that can be represented as a list of integers AND it's a significant performance bottleneck then, sure, I'll consider the array methods. But I don't recall the need arising in the last year or two.
Enterprise Java stuff just isn't often bottlenecked on that sort of thing. Network latency fills far more of my dreams ;)
Maybe we're seeing different sides of the language then. I'm doing a lot of integer-list sorting, building a search engine in java. I'm evenly split between Arrays.sort or GNU Trove's specialized primitive collections.
The overhead of List<Integer> really can not be overstated, it can approach order 1000% memory consumption, speed is prima facie about half for dealing with collections, but in practice it can be much lower from the GC churn. Even for lists as small as a million entries this can be quite untenable.
Maybe we're seeing different sides of the language then.
You are not seeing different sides of the language but participating in different domains, application/business logic programming vs more system level stuff.
