You should always reach for the simplest solution first (and Haoyi has a great set of guidelines about that: https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/StrategicScalaStylePrincipleofL... ). The point of those complex FP abstractions is to let you keep writing dumb code even when you want to do something fiddly (such as async operations with error recovery). But don't cargo-cult the complex solution if you don't have the complex problem! A plain function whose result is a plain value should be expressed that way.