How many LOC are you responsible for maintaining? Of all the confusing things in Scala the procedure vs method syntax seems like a trivial one, yet in deployed code bases most people use the procedure syntax. It has become a defacto standard. That the language designers got it wrong is bad, but not worse than the fix (or if they are going to "fix" this they should do it more slowly and not screw up Xlint/future).

I agree it's not the most confusing thing about Scala. It just doesn't help. It doesn't confuse me now (I remember programming languages were the distinction between function and procedure is important), but it makes little sense and I'm glad this syntax is removed for future generations of Scala devs.

Scala is a relatively new language that already has made too many concessions to backwards compatibility with Java, resulting in a less elegant language than it could have been. I'd rather they broke compatibility a few more times and got rid of their earlier mistakes.

This is not very important, though. I'd rather they focused on other, more important improvements first.