I haven't defended Kotlin's approach in any way, I don't know why you want to put words in my mouth. However if you don't see why Kotlin was well positioned, w

I haven't defended Kotlin's approach in any way, I don't know why you want to put words in my mouth. However if you don't see why Kotlin was well positioned, while Scala was not, then you clearly don't know much about either language. Technical merit is subjective, but different design decisions can precisely be made to win politics or not, and JetBrains made the right ones, first to convince people internally (who knew about Scala, you know), then Google, as they were fairly well aligned.