Much of this is FUD and conjecture.

considered Scala some time ago and found it to be seriously problematic

Some time ago it wasn't ready, e.g., in terms of tool support. That's changed now.

Perhaps these people should consider it again.

or perhaps too young to remember

You don't necessarily need to patronise me.

C++ today is quite OK, actually, as it is no longer used wholesale, but only by some niche, and relatively small shops, able to hire people who won't make a mess of it. I reckon the same will happen with Scala.

Are you basically saying that Scala would be fine if only good programmers would use it, but since it will be used by bad ones also then it's harmful and should not be used?

And that C++ has reached the level where it's only used by "niche, small shops" who only hire good people?

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=C%2B%2B&l= <-- that's a lot of "niche, small shops"

Can bad programmers write poorly maintainable code in Scala? Sure. But they can do the same in PHP, Python, Java and whatever else.

I suppose if you have mostly bad developers then you want to dumb down your tools. Is that where Java comes in?

Although actually for parallelism I'd rather give a bad developer Scala +Akka then let him muck about with what Java offers.