Not surprisingly, this approach has become very popular in recent years and made the Play team consider promoting it as the default in the upcoming ve

Not surprisingly, this approach has become very popular in recent years and made the Play team consider promoting it as the default in the upcoming version of the framework. It's not really the default. It's just another reasonable choice without adding guice as a dependency. Even the Starter templates include guice: https://github.com/playframework/play-scala-starter-example/blob/SNAPSHOT/build.sbt https://github.com/playframework/play-scala-starter-example/... Play! also does not enforce somebody to the Scala Ecosystem, it doesn't come with many functional patterns (but they can be used with it). The overall goal of the last versions was getting a DI approach, so that the testability of an Applikation can be greatly improved and also the testability of Play itself.