Actually Scala is the language I moved to Haskell away from. It turned out to be too messy and bloated for my taste. The syntax and the type inference are massi

Actually Scala is the language I moved to Haskell away from. It turned out to be too messy and bloated for my taste. The syntax and the type inference are massively inferior to Haskell. An absolute majority of Scala's advanced features are just copycatted from Haskell (typeclasses, STM, Scalaz, the majority of the Shapeless library that you mentioned). The promoted usage applies it's object-orientation mostly only to encode a modular system (e.g., the cake pattern). A lot of things are simply impossible to achieve due to Scala not being purely functional. So yes, Scala might have an edge over Haskell here and there, but IMO, as of a person who happens to have an extensive experience in Scala, in general it is majorly inferior compared to Haskell.