Ok, so here is my response.

I'll probably focus a bit on the things you think are not as interesting. Not because I dislike your opinion, or disagree with it, but because I think it might be interesting to share my view how and why even uninteresting feature X might add value in the end.

> Union/Intersection types. Any simplification of the type system with regards to type members.

Agree. I think it will be very interesting to see how many ugly LUBs will go away due to that. Also, having first-class support for type lambdas will make some people's lives vastly easier.

> Any removal of special XML features.

I guess it's the right thing to do, but I'll probably miss that feature ... not sure if it is possible to achieve feature parity with string interpolation.

> Any fixing of the travesty that is the collections library.

Yes, I agree that a lot of work could be done there.

> "The type system will have theoretical foundations that are given by a minimal core calculus." A type system being theoretically sound doesn't interest me. What does this provide me in practice?

I think the benefit is that it might free the time of compiler developers, because they might be able to skip the step of figuring out whether code X should compile or not. And if we know the type-system is sound, the chance of having code that throws ClassCastExceptions in unexpected places gets smaller.
But I guess the main benefit is easier reasoning, both for language developers and language users, which leads to less edge cases and feature interactions down the road.

> Macros/Reflection (not that it isn't actually important, but unless Macros are central to your paradigm like in Lisp, they are a hack, who cares how hacky they are).

I'll come back to this in a minute.

> Things that are missing: Structs. Structs. Real f'n Structs (granted this may be a JVM limitation but I'd trade nearly everything for them).

Absolutely agree on that. But this really depends on the VM, there is not much Scala can do to work around the lack of value types (see the limitations of AnyVal). I really hope Oracle manages to ship those things with JDK 10.

> Because the only reason I can think of for having giant sized tuples is in a code generation scheme most likely for an ORM system. Code generation in an ORM system is generally a bad idea and it bothers me that an ORM system seems to have the ear of the language designers.

ORMs are the vietnam of computer science, but I think that the need to represent properties of a database in code is not restricted to just ORMs.

Especially when you have multiple consumers of databases, it's often hard to correct the database schema without having to touch multiple projects in different languages for different customers.

I don't see that having better tuples would be a crutch to get around bad database design.
I think that especially with first-class union and intersection types, better tuples will get vastly more useful and will reduce the current fragmentation in the library space (tuples vs. HLists, etc.).

> [...] I would much prefer that the defacto standard was removed so that any solutions they came up with in the tooling space were of necessity workflow agnostic.

I think this is the huge opportunity macros give us. Eugene Burmako gave a talk recently about scala.meta and one of his examples was showing how people can build IDE-independent rewriting, reformatting and refactoring functionality using Scala's macro features.

> The single most important next step for the Scala community is to come up with an idiomatic style.

Agree. While a lot still needs to happen here, I think there was quite some progress in the last years.
From my point of view it seems as if the style of Scala code out there is slowly converging.
While the adoption of the recommendations in the style guide was good in my opinion, I think the upcoming framework for configuring compiler warnings and the possibilities of scala.meta to build "go fix" like tools will certainly make an impact.

> Finally, Typesafe the company and Scala the community need clearer boundaries.

Agree. From what I have heard, I think the right people are aware of these concerns now.

> It is troubling to me that the Akka/Play/Sbt/Slicks of the world get obvious preferential treatment when it comes to language prioritization.

Can you expand on that?