Sounds like we're actually in agreement about most of this.

I'm okay with languages limiting their "expressive" power in order to provide stronger correctness guarantees or just limit how "weird" code looks; but this is largely because I've worked on many projects where someone had written a heap of difficult-to-understand code, and I doubt such limitations would be appealing if I were working strictly on my own.

I also don't really see the appeal of Java-style inheritance, but to be honest I didn't use Scala for long enough to know whether or not I agree that Scala does inheritance "right".

It does make sense that Rust provides mutability in some cases where Scala doesn't. Rust's superpower, enabled by the borrow checker, is effectively "safe mutability." I hope other, simpler languages build on this invention.