Oh, I fully admit that I'm not up to date with modern module language design, my answer was purely pragmatic - using static methods doesn't seem to have made my code less reusable in any way that's been significant to me, and I write large complex systems in Java. I think that making blanket statements like the OP (checked exceptions are bad, singletons are better than static methods) is a little absurd - Java is for better or worse a pragmatic language and using static methods instead of singleton objects makes my code shorter, clearer and easier to understand to mere mortals. That's a win in my book.

That said, I'm a closet programming language geek so I'll check out your references, thanks for the pointers.