If you hate Swing and AWT, you have every reason to do so, as it is ugly in all sense: GUI is ugly, coding is also ugly. That's exactly why C# is killing Java on the client side application. One may claim that Swing runs on all platforms, yes but who cares! Most of the client application runs on Windows.

But Swing is just a small unseccessful piece of Java, and overall Java is a nice language and it definitely worthes one's time to learn. Even if you are not prepared to use it daily, it still opens a window for you and allows you to have some fresh air.