I never considered Scala a better Java. Scala was attempting to be a better language on the JVM, but you'd have to be tripping on something seriously heavy to think Scala even remotely resembles Java. Scala was basically the unholy love child of OCaml, and Haskell, with a tiny sprinkle of Java on top to make it play nicer on the JVM. I had high hopes for Scala, I'm a huge fan of Haskell, but I just couldn't bring myself to like Scala, it's an ugly language that ruins everything good in Haskell by polluting it with OO.

Kotlin on the other hand, really is a better Java. If you take Java, remove all the biggest day to day headaches, change around the defaults to be sane (I.E. the default is what you want 90% of the time, instead of the other way around), and add in some functional inspired helpers, you basically arrive at Kotlin. The delegate system, the way they finally got rid of the need to make pointless getters and setters on the off chance you might some day want them and not want to refactor your entire codebase, making classes and methods public by default since that's what you want almost always, and making types non-nullable by default are all MAJOR improvements over Java, but not something completely alien to the Java way of doing things.