Not a Scala developer, but...as a JVM language, what's stopping Scala from just adopting Gradle or Maven as a build tool? Maybe with just a thin sheen of Scala syntax on top of the underlying model?

As a working Java programmer, the build tools are one of the more pleasant parts of the development experience. I do some Ruby development at home (Ruby Motion, actually), and the build and dependency management tools seem pretty kludgy and patched together in comparison.