There's a lot of "seems" going around from people who haven't used the language, or dynamic-typing folk who obviously aren't going to pick a language that bets the farm on static types.

As a long-time Java dev myself, Scala is solving problems you don't even realise you have, because you don't know to look for them.

Powerful types, immutable state and FP make a world of difference for writing clear solutions, with better abstractions, less code, less bugs and less bullshit than the horrendous status quo of corporate Java development.