The academic origins give the language a clarity that's great, at the same time macros and implicits and other language features make IDE support slow and error

The academic origins give the language a clarity that's great, at the same time macros and implicits and other language features make IDE support slow and error-prone and the compilation process as a whole rather slower than Java's or Kotlin's. On top of that, the designers introduce breaking changes in every minor release, which makes it a poor choice for software that you want to last very long. All of these factors contributed to Scala adopters like LinkedIn subsequently retracing their steps and doing new development only in Java. So, academic origins are fine (many good programming languages have academic or at least research-influenced origins), but an academic attitude to the development work that a language should support (predictability of breaking changes, possibility of good IDE support) harms the adoption of a language.