I've used SBT with and without Play 2, and it was a pain every time. On a standalone app, resolving dependencies was the big time consuming part, but compilation was slow too. I'm not talking like 3x slower than Maven, but it feels slower.

We've had around 7 different projects using SBT at one point (most are now using Maven), and it was always that painful for us. We've mitigated the issue with resolution by using our Nexus server as a proxy, it helped a bit.

But other than performance, over the year we've had a lot of random issues with caching. Things like a dependency not found in the ivy cache which required us to completely remove the cache for that artifact. A "test" run which found no tests to run, which required us to remove the target directory for some reason.

Play 2 was just the icing on the cake: it has a lot of dependencies, and the routes in Scala takes what feels like forever to compile, not joking it feels like that single route file takes as much time to compile as 30 java files.

I'm sure it's not the experience of everyone, seeing how many people enjoy using Play 2/SBT but for our organization it wasn't a good choice.