No, that's precisely the thing -- I've met programmers who learned Scala as their first language for the JVM (some guys I'm thinking about coded in C and PHP before that), they are pretty proficient, and they absolutely do NOT need Java programmers "at hand". It's interesting that they "get" Scala; they don't try to use it as if it was Java++ (in my experience, this attitude you describe that Scala is merely a "skin" over Java is mostly due to prior knowledge of Java). When these people eventually need to learn some Java, they do so on their own -- and curse the language!

I think we're starting to see a new phenomenon: people who don't start on the JVM with Java. It's interesting because it shows (in my opinion) that the whole "Scala is too difficult" thing was mostly a misconception. What it was truly all about was: it's hard to give up old ways of thinking :)

I honestly can't see the point in scala if you're not integrating with the the javaverse ... I'd have thought you'd be far better off cutting a clean break and using a "proper" functional language like Haskell or Go

Obviously, one big draw of Scala is that it can interoperate with Java and take advantage of existing libraries. But that's a far cry from saying it's mostly a wrapper around Java. New code, including libraries, should be written entirely in Scala. The JVM is itself a valuable target, regardless of Java-the-language.

That said, I love Haskell and would definitely enjoy using it at work, but it's a no go for "political" reasons, which is sort of reasonable even if disappointing. Scala scares management way less than Haskell!