It shouldn't be, unless you were using macros (always officially experimental) or something - I was always primarily an Eclipse guy but IntelliJ worked well. Did you not get the green underline?
Didn't seem to matter how close to geotrellis we were though. That being said, I'm willing to buy that it confused IntelliJ enough that it gave up on entire packages
Either way, we ported a couple of the abstractions from there to go and just used that. The build times plus getting away from sbt have been enough of a win to keep us on go, and that's before we get to the memory reduction on in-memory rasters