Well, I’m sorry for your bad experiences with Scala and I really hope that they would be better these days.

For simple web applications, I think that Play is actually a good start. Alternatively, you can try e.g. our Bootzooka, which is a simple web application skeleton built out of some easily changeable building blocks. However I agree, that a set of simple libraries, which would nicely fit together and — probably more importantly — would be well documented is missing. Would be great to work on such a thing one day — time permitting :).

I think that things generally improved over the last 2 years, there’s much more tutorials on the web, and a couple of high-quality books.

Thanks for your feedback!