I've been writing a bunch of scala and it does feel like there's an elegantly minimal language hiding in a somewhat baroque one. The trouble is that I can't really point at what parts are the minimal subset and what parts are excessive. Even the truly weird stuff like implicit defs and package objects make sense in some contexts. It suffers from the same problem as C++, individually the features make sense, but combined they're too much.
Yes, it's the combination of features that's problematic. They don't compose well. I'd also say implicits are probably responsible for many developers rejecting Scala outright. They're an abomination as far as maintainability and IDE integration are concerned.
