Thanks for the rant, Dan - saves me a lot of typing :). It seems we have a generation of people that have been educated in software development while being well shielded from a) the hardware, and b) anything previously accomplished in the field. I've just started up a little project to do HA and fast messaging, and people are surprised that I insist on getting the HA bits right before even considering writing a single line of code for the actual messaging/queueing, etcetera. But then, I've yet to see one good product where HA (and scalablity, in various combinations) worked when it was slapped on as an afterthought.
The best thing that Jini/River has to teach us is to what extent remoting needs to be transparent to the developer. Sadly enough, more than most people are willing to put up with, but it's pretty hard to ignore basic facts of your trade and still expect working outcomes. On the initial question: I'd love to see first-class bindings for Scala in River (especially employing the function-as-a-first-class-citizen bit). Sounds like a cool project (but then, I got the one I just started to complete first ;-)).
