I'd be curious to read more about the context of this. It looks like there are soo many low hanging fruits for anyone with mid-level technical seniority to step in and improve the situation measurably. Scala isn't bad but sbt definitely has plenty of (avoidable in hindsight) footguns. The tooling ecosystem of Scala has also improved leaps and bounds in the last couple years. Of course that doesn't do anything to the seemingly disfunctional organization but like the engineering post it was, it didn't concern itself with it much.