I used the language professionally for 2.5 years and I have to agree with the parent comment. We weren't doing anything overly complex in Play and once in a whi

I used the language professionally for 2.5 years and I have to agree with the parent comment. We weren't doing anything overly complex in Play and once in a while we would come across types that IDEA wouldn't inspect. Even worse, IDEA highlights a section of code as an error, even though it compiles fine with SBT. SBT is fine if you're not doing anything complicated. But the moment we tried looking into building a plugin, even just to add a step in the asset compilation pipeline, it's a land of mystery. Instead of wasting time trying to decipher SBT plugins, we just used npm for our front-end assets. I also found working with Java libraries to be overly frustrating. We generally ended up having to write Scala wrappers around Java libraries in order to give ourselves an idiomatic interface. I will grant you that compilation time is usually exaggerated. Incremental compilation means you normally only wait a few seconds at a time. Now I do a lot of work in Haskell and find compilation significantly faster.