That's a good way to describe it. As I was reading the book there were lots of moments where a particular feature seemed very clever and elegant and fun to use, but as I kept reading and the number of features started to pile up it started to look like something that would be very difficult to use in most practical settings. Indeed, when we were doing show-and-tell sessions with out little Scala projects, even though we had all been reading the book, we'd frequently have to ask the presenter what exactly some piece of syntactic sugar meant or to remind us of the precise semantics of some feature. It just never really seemed to all "click" together like other languages have for me in the past.

That, and the compiler is dog-slow. I'm working with a group that is looking at using Scala as a basis for an embedded DSL for hardware construction right now, and the compile times are one of the biggest things that is steering us away. Not sure what the deal is there.