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)