No idea who your demigod is, but Martin is probably the best programmer I've worked with. How subtyping is combined with type inference in Scala is quite workable, not perfect, but not a train wreck either.
Scala isn't really the best functional language, but it might be the best OO language out there, especially with traits, no other statically typed language has done mixins as well.
5 years is a long time in terms of Scala, maybe the Scala community has the chance to welcome you back some time in the future and show you how much stuff has been improved since back then? :-)
Scala isn't really the best functional language, but it might be the best OO language out there, especially with traits, no other statically typed language has done mixins as well.