I think I've figured Scala out. It's a statically typed JVM language meant to be more powerful and at the same time easier to use than Java. It's a functional language. Though, it's also imperative. And object-oriented. It favors immutability, except that mutability is just as easy (or hard). It has adopted the actor model. But it has also adopted all of Java's concurrency constructs. It was designed as a very practical language. And it's also a research language with some experimental features. Oh, I almost forgot: it is meant to be a high-performance language. But it's also designed to build DSLs. It's a very opinionated language in the sense that it's opinion is that all opinions are valid.

So I must say that any difficulty you may have understanding what Scala is trying to be is due to no fault of Scala itself. It's very simple, really (well, to be precise, there are different tiers of simplicity in Scala, but I can assure you that each tier is quite simple once you've mastered all the design decisions, and category theory, that fully, consistently and self-sufficiently define the simplicity of the respective tier).