[lmm]

I found that akka (akka-core) was not just bad, but bad enough that it dragged down the reputation of Scala. Most (maybe all) of the time simple future-based code accomplishes the same thing in a much clearer way, and without sacrificing the type safety that's one of the biggest strengths of Scala.

(Some higher-level things under the akka umbrella e.g. akka-http (formerly spray-http) and akka-streams might be useful; not coincidentally they also tend to be more type-safe)