As pointed out in my post, the alleged influence simply isn't there, or isn't there enough to justify the claim. Someone who cites Smalltalk as their inspiration before going off and creating a statically-typed OO language with primitive types and classes that aren't real objects either didn't understand Smalltalk or deliberately chose to distort the concepts imbued in it enough that they no longer have a right to claim it as an antecedent.
Gosling and others have been making claims of this sort for years, and yes, I do believe that they do so with the hope of improving their language's reputation, and further, to give their users the impression that they aren't missing out on anything by sticking with Java; that Gosing et al. studied the cream of the language crop when designing Java, took the good parts and left the cruft behind, so why bother trying anything else?
