There’s two different issues. Programmers who are beginners in Scala and using Scala as a first programming language. I came to Scala from C#/ Visual Studio. I’ve always used Eclipse as my main work horse. Although I now edit in Eclipse and use sbt with ScalaFx and Revolver / sbt and scala.js on auto fastParse. I remember the overwhelming sentiment in the C# community was: Were’ not here because we have any love for Microsoft, but because Visual Studio is such an awesome tool.
So I recommend using Scala Eclipse. Yes its not perfect, but the improvement over when I first used it is huge. If the Scala community is serious about making it easy for beginners then Scala-ide should be a priority. No not all programmers use IDEs but a very large percentage do.
As for Scala as a beginners language. Its fine in an academic setting, but can Scala seriously compete with HTML, CSS JavaScript, PHP and Bash, for learning something with immediate usefulness? I would love to see that happen, but at the moment just competing with Python is a major challenge.