True.

I still think it is a shame that neither Red Hat nor Jet Brains has joined forces with Scala/Typesafe. Both of these companies know how to ship products and make developers happy. This is something that Typesafe has to learn now. On the other hand, Red Hat and Jet Brains need to learn how to do language research... (which may actually be harder, once they go beyond fixing the obvious Java flaws).

As much as I personally like Scala I understand why a lot of people are taking a wait & see attitude. I think it's not too unreasonable to imagine that a less ambitious Java++ like Kotlin might find the traction that has so far eluded Scala.

With respect to publishing, it depends on what conferences you target with your publication. For example, at the intersection of the software engineering and PLDI communities, you'll have quite a few researchers interested in proper tooling. ASE (Automated Software Engineering), for example, is a highly regarded conference that is really interested in this type of research.

There are also other incentives for researchers to create usable tools and implementations (assuming that the tools are actually meant to be more than experimental prototypes).

To begin with, compiler developers traditionally "dogfood" their compilers. They may still be willing to live with things that you wouldn't have in a commercial product, but they can't and don't completely neglect usability, either.

Second, usable tools are more likely to be adopted by other researchers, creating a positive feedback loop with respect to future publishing opportunities.