But my experience aligns with @BobKerns experiences, and so it does seem like the best choice. Now: I would not be against ability to use other Maps, so that only the default implementation would use LHM. Since this actually leads to a bigger discussion -- if and how to extends JsonNod...
Also, In most cases, you convert an ArrayList to HashMap or LinkedHashMap, depending upon the scenario, so the problem of converting a List to Map is actually the same as the problem of converting an ArrayList to HashMap or LinkedHashMap because ArrayList is a List and HashMap is a ...