One "fun" thing about working in Scala is that you get attacked from all sides; there are people who say that the language is too weird or too purist, and then there are people who say that the problem is that it makes it too easy to have mutable variables or imperative code, or the fact that it allows you to do traditional OO inheritance.
FWIW, my experience is that when you introduce a bit of mutable state or hidden side effects, you usually regret it later. I probably come across as fanatical at times, but that fanaticism is coming purely from painful experience; these academic, theoretical concerns become a lot less academic when you've had to deal with production bugs that they could have helped you avoid.
I find it impossible to imagine the same being true for the C devotees. I've seen fast and slow programs in all sorts of languages. I've never seen a performance problem in anything other than a scripting language that wasn't either solved with a little bit of profiling, or just fundamentally impossible in any language. I've seen a C++ program rewritten in Haskell for a 5x performance speedup. And I've seen so many segfaults.
FWIW, I've found it pretty easy to escape C. In JVM-land you really don't have to deal with it, at least 99.9% of the time; I've hit like two JVM bugs in my entire career. Scala is by no means the easiest to hire for, but it's a great language for getting on with solving business problems - whether you want to do that by churning out reams of code, or by abstracting out the mundane parts and writing only the parts that are specific to the problem. It makes the easy things easy and the hard things possible; very rarely have I felt that the language was limiting me or stopping me from doing what I wanted. There's plenty wrong with it, but it's the best choice I've found.