The most annoying thing about IntelliJ is the way it's keyboard shortcuts clash with virtually every keyboard shortcut of your average Linux distro. Other than that it's an awesome tool.
I don't think it's unreasonable to respond to a very poor quality blog post bashing Scala since it received very widespread publicity. The interesting story behind the story is the extreme enthusiasm with which Scala bashing posts are upvoted on various forums. It's highly unlikely that the majority of those voting have actually used Scala.
I should also point out that it's a feature which I don't believe detracts from readability. It's pretty clear from looking at code which uses ST what it does. There are examples in this thread.
It's a feature that you will use directly maybe once a year when adding it to a library, but I then use that library (and indirectly that feature) virtually every day. YMMV but we've found it very useful.
Removing structural typing wouldn't be an improvement to my mind. It's the sort of thing you use maybe once a year, but when you do it's extremely useful to have around. It's a bit like saying that removing the ternary conditional operator in Java would make a big difference to developers' lives.
The quality of the original "1-star" blog post was extremely low. Odersky sums it up well with:
This week-end's edition is called "Scala - 1 Star - would not program again", and it's by someone who from reading his post seems to have written Scala all of two weeks after coming form Javascript. I think the interesting bit is not so much that these posts are written, but that they are upvoted so much.
I was also very surprised to see such a low-quality blog post being voted up with such enthusiasm on HN and elsewhere.
The Scala equivalent is called Slick, and it's the only SQL DSL that approaching anything near widespread use. I fail to see how incomplete projects on GitHub which happen to be written in Scala are relevent to this discussion.
* You might be better off using a pre-release snapshot of Java 8 as a better Java. You'll get closures, functional collections, and better type inference. I bet Eclipse and Intellij support it better too.*
You lose out on most of the features of Scala, and IntelliJ supports Scala very well.
Which is pure opinion/speculation.