I like Ceylon a lot, and I think the creator has done an awesome job taking community feedback and integrating it into his vision. It's one of the few languages I'd be happy to work in day in and day out.

It doesn't really compete with Kotlin with being a barely better java. I don't think Kotlin really adds all that much compared to Java but it's stupid simple to learn so I can see some teams transitioning to it.

Scala on the other hand is not easy to learn, but very powerful and can be written as a fully functional language. It's awesome, it has some warts, but at this point it has so much momentum that people who want type system power + FP on the JVM are going to choose Scala. It has the libraries, it has a plethora of big companies using it, and it has plenty of jobs (check the HN hiring posts even).

Ceylon definitely improves a bit on Scala, but maybe not enough. That being said, I like seeing other 'powerful' languages thrive, so hopefully it will pick up a bit more adoption. Alternatively, Gavin and the team will just decide to help out the scala compiler development ;-)