and yet Paul Phillips still, to this day, writes Scala. Think about that, he's one of Scala's biggest critics; still Scala all day, everyday.

There's nothing "shaky" about Scala's complexity, it's quite stable, and not going anywhere until Dotty lands circa 2020.

Despite everything (slow compiler, average tooling, implicit/operator overloaded "magic" code bases, etc.) Scala will draw library creators (like those behind Spark, Kafka, Akka, Play, etc.) which in turn draws developers, resulting in the thriving ecosystem backing the language.

Scala will live on despite itself; the ecosystem is what will carry the language to the Dotty land and beyond.