Thanks for the detailed reply. You're one of the HNers whose opinions I highly respect. Wish HN had the following features like Twitter.
My understanding of Scala is very superficial. So my opinion is obviously very biased at this moment. I've been immersing myself in Clojure and ClojureScript on and off for most of this year. Learning Scala will be on my todo list for the new year. Hope I will have something to share then. I may change my opinion though, should the new version of Scala rectify most of the flaws, given the fact that Rod Johnson joined TypeSafe, who tends to have the gift to simplify complexities.
And no, I don't like Java either and consider that it's reasonable that the community needs a more expressive language on JVM and leave Java as a supporting role to write underlying performance-critial JVM libraries just like C to the native libs.