You are talking from the point of view of an advanced I-know-about-this-stuff annoyance level.

Newbies to Scala, especially those coming from Java, couldn't care less whether it looks more like ML or like Haskell. Both languages would be alien to them. Robert Harper's "Existential Type" blog is hardly aimed at the average programmer.

I'm pretty sure this is not the worst part about Scala :)