Hi, thanks for taking the time to reply. My personal opinion of SBT is one that represent almost every developer I've discussed it with. Jumping to the bottom line - an experience like: rubygems, npm, lein (clojure), and that kind of build and package family is much preferred - one example is Buildr.
It's hard to pinpoint a developer 'instinct', but I think a build/dependency tool like rubygems or npm is one of the first things a developer bumps into, and becomes a central part of the experience _very early_, even before the experience of the language. With that in mind, SBT present a cryptic (some times even non-scala) like feel to it.
Speaking of rubygems and npm, SBT also solves issues that neither of them are solving.
Actually npm doesn't even solve the issue of dependency management well for client-side dependencies - people apparently use Bower for that - and then just wait until you get the idea of building mixed apps. And then building stuff may not be so required for one-off JS scripts, but if you want to run a linter over your code, or to package dependencies in a single binary based on Common.js or AMD and maybe to do minification for distribution, then you're in for a world of hurt. And in case you think it's unfair to compare the clusterfuck that is Javascript's ecosystem against SBT/Scala, you may be interested to know that Scala.js (the Scala to Javascript compiler) is a pleasure to work with, one reason being that it just works with SBT.
The Ruby ecosystem is somewhat close to sane, but beginners still have to deal with gemspec versus bundler, rubygems versus Rails, rvm vs rbenv, plus the issue of native dependencies (for Scala/SBT, the only native dependency is the JVM itself and until 2016 at least Java SE 6 is all you need). And Python for example - is another example of a clusterfuck.
It's easy to forget as experienced developers that we did experience pain when we started with our current platform. Lets face it - when it comes to dependency management and build systems, we should be ashamed of ourselves. And now after having worked with other environments, SBT may suck (it does, it really does), but to me it sucks less than everything else I tried, because at least it solves most of my needs out of the box and for the edge cases there's usually a plugin available.
It's hard to pinpoint a developer 'instinct', but I think a build/dependency tool like rubygems or npm is one of the first things a developer bumps into, and becomes a central part of the experience _very early_, even before the experience of the language. With that in mind, SBT present a cryptic (some times even non-scala) like feel to it.