No, I'm pretty sure the reason they dropped CLR support was that there was no good way to get a decent .NET interop story with a language with a substantially different type system than .NET assumes (particularly, with higher-kinded types) given .NETs reified generics.

This is one respect in which .NET's superiority over the JVM as a platform for its core languages (C#/VB.NET on .NET vs. Java on the JVM) made it worse for flexibility. Reified generics are great for implementing languages with a C#-like-type-system, but they limit the power of the type systems you can have.

No.

Your comment might be more useful if you gave a reason or an argument or some data or something...

When you are a .NET shop with C++, C# and F# at your disposal why invest into Scala?

F# is a remarkably less powerful language than scala. Along with the cost of Visual Studio + windows licenses, the Scala/open source ecosystem is just a better choice.

For corporations, the cost of Visual Studio and Windows licenses is a drop of water in their ocean budget.

There is enterprise software way more expensive than that.

Corporations for which VS/Win licenses don't matter are usually exactly those which don't let developers use F#. So what's your point?