[lmm]

Boilerplate is a problem but doesn't make a language harder to understand. Language-level shortcuts to reduce boilerplate generally make the language harder to understand, IME (I'm thinking of e.g. Perl's $_).

I actually agree that implicit conversions are to be minimized. But you do need a way of doing the equivalent of the magnet pattern - which in Kotlin is either a different language-level feature, or simply impossible. I'm hopeful that a simpler underlying abstraction can be found - but Kotlin feels to me like it's just piling on a bunch of special cases without making any effort to be consistent or unified.

[evacchi]

You won't be able to implement type classes. There might be something in that direction after 1.0; still, Kotlin is not supposed to be a contender with Scala w.r.t. expressive power. It is just Java with more concise syntax, and with most design patterns turned into language features: singleton, delegates, lambdas/sam, "utils" classes (extension methods).