I completely agree that much of the verbosity allows the language to express more, e.g. looking at a method signature in Java I know its visibility, what (if anything) it will return, what types I can/should pass it, and what exceptions it can throw...compare that to Ruby where the signature alone doesn't tell me any of that.

But there's also a lot of verbosity that adds no (or very little) value, e.g. System.out.println() instead of something like just println() or the several lines of boilerplate needed to run something in a new thread.