[chc]

I don't think "the JVM is not an exciting environment" is quite on the mark, given that Clojure gets a lot of attention. But I believe this is close.

I think the real reason is that Scala feels too much like a typical Java-with-a-twist JVM language for many people to want to take a closer look. Scala's rep as "Java++" is beneficial in a lot of ways, but failing to excite certain segments of the hacker community is the corresponding downside.