Been a while since I've used Scala, but I remember Scala being much more focused on functional programming than Kotlin.

I don't think that's a fair representation. Like for any community, you tend to hear the most about a vocal minority, and drama there was, indeed. That's not unique to Scala, that doesn't mean that a majority was engaged in it or was affected by it.

The point about fragmentation holds, though: Scala is a multi-paradigm language, so you tend to have communities assembling around core set of libraries and abstractions that fit their specific needs. It's not a bad thing from an engineering perspective (you get to pick the most adequate tool for the job), but it will be intimidating at first, and understandably ridiculous when coming from a different ecosystem that you've a choice of a dozen or so JSON deserializing libraries. https://index.scala-lang.org/ Is a great help, though.

Umm, Clojure joined the chat.

Clojure in my opinion is the most beautiful and powerful language I have ever seen.

It has the full power of java ecosystem, amazing and simple concurrency, extremely simple syntax and semantics. You literally start ascending to other dimensions after a while of writing clojure. It's like you are talking to your software.

Thanks, that's really helpful!