If someone can reasonably choose to formulate something, and for that formulation to pass static verification but do something totally unexpected, the language is at fault, not the author.
It does and the consequences are scary.
I've been hit by the scoping rules many times, but every time I ask myself why I'm using identifiers like i, j or x to refer to different variables in nested scopes anyway. Names like that should be reserved for only the tightest of scopes.
Is there another aspect of the scoping rules that you're referring to?
Implicitly scoping variables to their lexically-outermost point of use is a terrible solution, though: changing anything in any outer scope can completely change the meaning of code in all nested scopes. That's really really bad.
A much better syntax would is to require the 'var' keyword to denote the scope of every variable, but reject shadowed symbols at compile time.