ADDITIONAL SYSTEM INFORMATION :
Not necessary

A DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEM :
Duplicate of https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-4632244

Priority: Very low.

Please re-consider it. Altough it is relatively easy to work around in certain cases, it is also should be easily done in JDK if You wouldn't have done it wrong in a first place.

Please remember, You can add it once and for everyone, while we have to do it thousands of times all over the world each time we do hit such a point where strong reference would be nice.

I do understand Your reluctance to do it after looking at Reference source. Somebody really messed up a public contract with an implementation and what is inside does not fit at all a simple strong reference:

public final StrongRef....
{
     private final T x
     T get(){ return x;};
     .... and so on, ignoring all requests to enqueue it, as for StrongReference it has no point.
};

To solve it for most of us and to save Your time you may introduce and interface which just declares what javadoc of Reference do. Or, which is less ground shaking, re-factor it to have Reference -> ReferenceImpl -> WeakReference inheritance chain instead of Reference->WeakReference as You have it now. Then giving us a strong reference would be a piece of cake, or You may just give us a protected Reference constructor.

Best regards,
  Tomasz Sztejka.

P.S. I'm polling my email about once a month, so don't fret if I'm not responding.