I'm not anti-Scala—I develop in it every day and think it's a great language. But bashing a strawman like that isn't going to win anyone over.
re: language flamewars, interesting, perhaps you've noticed some of the FP heavies laying into Scala here on HN, Reddit and Twitter. I'd say the flaming by an overwhelming majority is coming from the other side of the fence.
These days, it's best just to read all of the comments, including any that have been grayed out. A lot of the time they're perfectly legitimate. It's just unfortunate that they're harder to read.
I agree, sometimes heavily downvoted comments reflect the truth of things more than those comments that are upvoted via, say, sycophantic pandering.
A nice HN addition would be to toggle comment color; that way one could view greyed out comments in isolation relative to upvoted comments and vice-versa.