Those were my fears with sticking with something like Scala. I just know I would fall back on imperative programming rather than being forced to understand functional programming.

Scala itself doesn't seem bad, but my gripe is just getting a working project set up. With sbt, I know I have to create a few files just to get up and running. Not knowing Maven syntax - can be embedded in sbt, I think - or sbt itself, I don't find it appealing to learn that kind of tooling outside of work.