Given that a fair few people at EPFL seem to work on it and there seems to be a tendency for thesis projects to be written on Scala or to be updates/improvement

Given that a fair few people at EPFL seem to work on it and there seems to be a tendency for thesis projects to be written on Scala or to be updates/improvements to Scala, that alone seems like a decent source of updates (if not for stability, though). Perhaps Scala can run on academic grants (into programming languages research, or just a small portion of researchers' other work)? Also the work on Dotty seems to be progressing apace, folding the community in quite a bit (https://contributors.scala-lang.org https://contributors.scala-lang.org and https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/issues https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/issues)