This assumes that the problem really is httpclient's fault, which is
kind of questionable given how widely used that library is. I'd also be
concerned about all the problems such as proxy authentication and so on
that have been carefully ironed out over the years that would need to
start from scratch. Also, perhaps we'd lose many features, such as a
connection pool to speed things up. It's a big open question...
In terms of lose of features my brief look up yielded nothing (e.g. connection pool is "HttpClient.executor(Executors.newFixedThreadPool(NUMBER))" regarding proxy support I would be really surprised if the in JVM implementations support less things than apache httpclient.
This is meant to be food for thought as keeping up with all the third party dependencies is really a whole lot of work with people willing to do it becoming less and less. That's the reason I look for ways to reduce that work as I don't have high hopes people will jump in to do that work.
