That's a pretty terrible defense of scala. Sounds more like a "I hate some random scala projects for made up reasons". How does scalaz have "colossal snobbism" exactly? Because it contains stuff you haven't learned?
As for Scalaz elitism, the canonical example would be the T-hole himself, _ Morris (who has more or less been expelled from the main Scala user groups). I think the general POV the OP is trying to convey is that Scalaz is an incomprehensible cluster fuck of symbols to everyone but those in the know; in other words, the learning curve is steep and historically the response to beginner questions has been something along the lines of, "go read this paper" a la Haskell.
SBT suffers a similar problem but that's, IMO, more due to lack of IDE support for the project/ build than anything else (i.e. it's difficult to discover [for me] the library without being able to click through method calls and experientially explore the code [Scala docs only get me so far]).
In other news the last milestone of Scala 2.11 was just released; 2014 should be a good year for Scala on many fronts (faster compilations and improved IDE support particularly)
Right, I get that there are lots of scala people who are very anti-intellectual and are vehemently opposed to learning anything. But what I don't get is how "if I don't learn this stuff, I don't understand it" is "snobbism" on the part of people providing the library you didn't learn.
>and historically the response to beginner questions has been something along the lines of, "go read this paper" a la Haskell.
I have not seen that response in either scalaz or haskell. It sounds an awful lot like the common strawman used to dismiss haskell as "academic" from people who have never bothered to try it. Practical experience with haskell in particular has been that people are ridiculously accommodating and helpful.
There's a lot of tutorials in Haskell that are papers, but if you go to #haskell or ask on stack overflow, the answer to questions are rarely "go read this paper", at least in my experience (even for some pretty deep type-level programming stuff).