Since OH 3 came out, for a number of reasons that don’t have anything to do with the usability or quality of them, I’ve not been using the Helper Libraries. I’ve also moved all my rules to the UI.
My observations are:
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The need for the Helper Library is greatly reduced when writing rules in the UI because you don’t have to define the rule or triggers in code at all. You just need to write the function.
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The opportunity to install and use rule templates will hopefully eliminate most of the complexity of rule writing entirely for a lot of cases. See Rule Templates - openHAB Community for a growing collection of rules you can just install and configure like an add-on through MainUI.
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There is ongoing work to make sure the helper libraries that make writing rules reasonable be a part of the automation add-on itself.
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If you don’t want to fight between what’s Python and what’s Java, there are two options for writing rules in pure Java available on the marketplace. JavaRule Java Scripting (SmartHome/J version) (works to write rules in Java in the UI, should be included in the next release of OH according to the comments) and JRule - openHAB Rules using Java (has a few more limitations including Unix only and can’t be used in the UI).