Ask HN: Community's take on Play and Scala: worth learning?

I was recently presented with the opportunity to start a new project that must use the Play web framework (written in Scala). The team behind the project is OK with the fact that I have not used them previously, so this is an opportunity to learn something new. I'm quick to learn and I've used many frameworks before (web and others) so adapting is not an issue. PHP is my strong now (Symfony) and I don't really like Java (this opinion is out of question's scope - no offense to Java coders).

What is the community's opinion on Play & Scala? What do experienced coders in this framework have to say about it? Is it worth learning? Thanks for your thoughts all!

Scala is an interesting language -- It's big - there are a lot of concepts, and on first glance, I didn't particularly like it because it wasn't very opinionated - there are 5 different ways to do anything, and no real indication on which one is "right".

For me, taking Martin Odersky's Coursera class made the language "click" for me. That is, Odersky invented the language to express a particular way of thinking about problems and breaking them into components. The "other" ways of doing things are side effects of this, but there's a definite thought process that Scala facilitates that is a bit unnatural, or at least unintuitive in other languages. It's worth trying.