It's a bit subtler than that. Scala is an industry programming language perfectly suited to business applications, but with a big academic and research input (remember that Odersky, its creator, was a big contributor to Java, an industry language) and with an initial emphasis on research. The mentioned talk is criticizing Scala's marketing blurb because it was written almost entirely from a research angle, and doesn't accurately and convincingly portray Scala's benefits for business. See the revised blurb at the end of the talk [1]. It's a question of being clever about marketing.
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[1] revised blurb: "Scala is an open source programming language that helps you write correct code and modify code safely, while seamlessly reusing existing JVM libraries."
Egison features a customizable pattern-matching facility. Pattern-matching methods for each data type and pattern can be customizable by users. There might be a possibility that you thought syntax sugar is not syntax sugar.
Egison appears to be a self-consciously academic language, which strikes me as a perfectly legitimate.
In particular, the goal seems to be to provide a more intuitive way of writing algorithms using extensible pattern matching. Now, I have worked on commercial software that has highly algorithmic parts (graph traversals, etc.) written in Erlang (a language that supports a powerful, but not extensible, form of pattern matching). I found the pattern matching facilities to be quite helpful in producing readable, concise, correct code.
The use case is narrow, but strikes me as real nonetheless.