[continuations]

Most of your points only apply to Scala.

Is there anything Play 2 Java can do that Play 1 Java + Japid template cannot do as well?

Seems like the move to Play 2 and Scala is more political than technical. The Play people formed an alliance with Typesafe, a Scala company, and thus decided to move away from Java and focus on Scala, abandoning their huge Java user base of Play 1.

[gren]

Nope this is not what happened. Play team made the decision months before to start moving to Scala when experimenting the play-scala module of Play1.

This is a technical decision to build a web framework to the JVM. And even if the core is written in Scala, it doesn't mean you can't use it in Java. Give a try!