I'm used to doing everything in emacs anyway, so the IDE issue wasn't much of a hindrance. I didn't find the learning curve all that steep either, although I do have some prior experience with other functional languages. Overall I found Scala an extremely nice language to work with.

I've put it on the back burner for now though because the job market is still so tiny. If I see more people looking for Scala skills I'll make it a priority again.