2.1.x and forward has settled down a lot. They're still doing a lot of work under the hood to improve HTTP pipelining and other fun things. Worth reading their future roadmap.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OEt6gZ3a-daSkNXqXGAM4jBs...

That roadmap is outdated. Here is the most recent one: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11sVi1-REAIDFVHvwBrfRt1uX...

Moving to 2.x still seems like more trouble than it's worth, but maybe I'm just burnt out on learning another templating system =/

Is scala not the templating in 1.x?

Apparently it's groovy, I just knew it as the templating for Play before now :)

http://www.playframework.com/documentation/1.2.5/templates#s...

They needed to ditch Groovy for Play 2.

Seems the Android guys are facing the same problems with Groovy in their Gradle based build system, and the Gradle team are considering switching to Scala for Gradle 2 to keep Android on board.

Can you explain/give a link?

You can use any templating system you want, including the one which was used in Play 1.