JSP sucks arse

Is it me or is JSP the most god-awful, sucky language of all time? The following piece of struts taglib rocks:

 <html:select property="cpuManufacturerId">
  <html:options collection="cpuManufacturers" property="id" labelproperty="manufacturer"/>  
 </html:select>

(equivalent to a for/in loop over all cpuManufacturers to create an HTML Select box) but everything else about the language sucks arse. Is velocity or anything else better or just sucky in a different way?

Oh for a minimal Java implementation of PHP that can talk to Servlets...