So much better ;-)

There's a learning curve, can't hit the ground running as you can with Groovy, but with Groovy there's a ceiling; with Scala the only ceiling is (perhaps) Haskell and for that you have to leave the JVM.

Languages where you can "hit the ground running" always have a ceiling. If you churn out working code quickly, you're offloading the real work onto someone else in the future. Real world programming, like business, is all about borrowing from the future, intending to default on the debt.