Personally I'm not having discussions about Scala with the purpose of winning arguments, but rather with the purpose of clearing misunderstandings and this goes

Personally I'm not having discussions about Scala with the purpose of winning arguments, but rather with the purpose of clearing misunderstandings and this goes both ways. The "_" character is a placeholder for things that can be named, but for which you don't care about that name. And because you don't care about the name, it can function as a wildcard (i.e. any). To me all use-cases of the underscore make perfect sense and I can't remember a single instance in which I was confused by its meaning. Type lambdas are arcane, but as @lmm points out, this is more about the absence of a feature. Basically in Scala type lambdas do not have first class support and so they are based on Scala's abstract types. As to why they don't have first class support? Well, because people complain about too many features ;-) But it's worth pointing out that the TypeLevel folks have plans to introduce first-class support in their fork and thus propose an improvement. And also, because of the work that happened in Dotty, Scala the language is heading towards a DOT calculus foundation, along with a unification of higher kinded types with abstract types, which should iron out the edge cases. The curry syntax seems silly if you come from SML, Ocaml, Haskell or languages from the ML family in general. In such languages all functions have exactly one argument. But Scala is not an ML language and so it doesn't do currying by default. It's annoying sometimes, but as with all design choices there are disadvantages and benefits.