I’m having a hard time envisioning a project that could be killed by choosing Scala that wasn’t actually killed by bad engineering. Scala is pretty easy to write Just Simpler Java in….

I would say that Scala is more complicated than Java because it introduces a number of useful new features to a JVM language.

Perhaps it's running on a semi-embedded system...

The fact that it's simpler Java makes it a good candidate for failure: it tries to remove from the code enough to make it hard to maintain.