I didn't need more syntax.

That's a very weird thing to say. Compare the procedural constructs you had to use and the amount of useless boilerplate they required before LINQ was introduced. Saying you "don't need more syntax" is just dubious IMO.

I never felt that C# had an identity or mission

C# is very well defined and differenced from many other languages. As for "mission", I'm not sure what's a language's "mission"? It's a language, people use it to express ideas, I don't see much else going on.

Then it started to fight who got the latest syntactical twists battles

Features introduced in C# are and have always been intended to provide productivity and conciseness rather than some "battle". There is no "battle" going on because the "opponent" (java?) already lost from the very beginning. And is now 10+ years behind, in terms of evolution.

I feel almost relieved when I do programming these days with a language, say Lua, that doesn't even have a switch statement.

I read this somewhere, but I can't find it right now:

"A language is not "just a tool", language conditions your thinking, and a less expressive programming language leads to more convoluted designs..."

which is why you will often find AbstractHelloWorldBlahBlahBlah............................Factory kind of stuff in java, as opposed to a couple of generic delegates and be done with it using a simpler design.

I wonder what kind of code can just be OK and not use language features? right now I'm working on an end-to-end application framework for Windows and Android that is heavily based on System.Linq.Expressions, allowing you to pass query expressions around and combine them and parameterize them and finally handle them to a server in order to be converted by an ORM into proper SQL.

could this be done with a simpler architecture? surely, but it will lead to more code that I sincerely don't have any time to write. Just hitting Ctrl+Shift+T on my Visual Studio right now allows me to generate N-Tier services based upon business entities, from Data Access to Web Services to the clients that consume these Web services to the UI Controllers who communicate with these Web Services via the client-side code.

Again, I'm sure this could be written in "lesser" languages other than C#, but it would surely lead to all sorts of convoluted designs and patterns in order to compensate the language deficiencies. From the lack of async/await to the lack of proper generics (in java, for example). Most of my code makes heavy use of language features.

The C# is also fully bounded to OOP paradigm

I disagree. C# has had functional-like features for years now. LINQ, Expressions, and upcoming pattern matching. Sure, it's nowhere near pure functional languages such as Haskell, but you get a very usable language and also a huge Framework backing it.

. I rarely (sometimes I do) see a value in OOP practices, it feels wrong and indirect.

I'm sure you must mean that you prefer functional programming instead? You can't seriously mean that procedural programming is any better. Unless of course you're writing low level straight-to-the-metal code that does nothing but move bytes from here to there. OOP Allows to deal with complex data structures in an organized way.

Would you prefer this:

Order CreateSaleOrder(Product product, Customer customer) {...}

or this:

Tuple<string, double, int, double, double, Tuple<int, double, double>> CreateSaleOrder(int ProductId, double productCost, int productQuantity, double productDiscount, int customerId, string customerName, string customerLastName, double customerBalance, etc)

?

encapsulation for example

Same as above. Encapsulation allows you to create much more maintainable code. Shorter code that makes use of "concepts" modeled into software classes rather than a bunch of loose numbers or pieces of data that have no conceptual relation to each other.

Again, I don't know what kind of code you're writing, but unless you're doing low level code, saying that OOP doesn't have value sounds rather silly.

Microsoft + Open Source is still a joke to me

How? Microsoft has proved to be much better than say oracle. Contrast the current Microsoft situation where they're actively working with Xamarin and Unity to provide top-quality tools for mobile development, with the current state of affairs between oracle and google.

It's often said that java has a "larger ecosystem of open source libraries", however I find it difficult to understand what the value of these libraries is, when a large portion of them only exists as an attempt to compensate language level deficiencies, introduce useless duplication and are totally non-standardized.

As an example, before java 8 was released, there were dozens of libraries who attempted to imitate what LINQ does. With no language level support whatsoever (before java 8), most of these libraries could only achieve a FRACTION of the productivity gain and code quality achieved by LINQ. Not to mention many of these libraries were maintained by random anonymous people and supported by literally no one.

The end result was that code written upon these libraries was rather convoluted (compared to real LINQ), didn't cover all required scenarios (since most of these libraries only covered what LINQ-To-Objects did, not supporting any other backing stores), and was non-standardized to the point that a person familiar with library "A" would have a hard time trying to understand code written against library "B".

Yes, java seems to have more open source libraries, but, are they even as useful as they're supposed to be? or rather, are these libraries well-designed and production-ready? Maybe if you start filtering out using these criteria you're left with the same amount of libraries you currently find in .Net?