Some package-private classes exist inside of the jdk which have duplicate names to public ones that are in different packages.  It appears that if one relies on the hinting system to find missing imports, and tries to use a public class where a package-private duplicate exists , instead of offering a hint to import the public one, the hint system declares that the class is not public, and cannot be accessed outside of that package.

To replicate:
1) With a class name that happens to be both package-private and public in different packages which are both visible to a java program, such as java.lang.CharacterData (package-private) and org.w3c.dom.CharacterData (public), enter what would otherwise be valid code using the desired public class using just the class name, without importing it first.

2) Wait a moment for the hint system to detect that the class has not been imported yet.

3) Note that instead of having options to add the necessary missing import statement to the top of the file, an error indicates that the class cannot be used outside of the package, presumably the first one that the hint system found when searching for the class name through visible packages.

Desired behavior:
The hint system would detect that the class is public in another package, and would prompt the user to add the necessary missing import, as it does in the typical case, and only fall back to the error about not being usable outside of the package if the class name was not actually declared as public anywhere else.

Workaround:
Not relying on the hint system to reliably import missing classes