> IMO sbt already hit the high-water mark and is receding, lots of shops using scala today advocate using mvn.

I haven't seen that at all in practice. I think that's just a bit of noise on the internet.

SBT keeps getting better, and many shops which originally opted to stay with Maven are now moving to SBT, because it's just so much better than Maven.

Not sure what your problem is. Even back in the 0.7 days, SBT was better than Maven. I'll change profession before I ever move back to Maven.

Oh, let's have a look what that "senior Typesafe" guy has to say about SBT vs. Maven:

  Well, coming from first contributing to the maven-scala-
  plugin, then eclipse, then sbt itself, I can tell you that
  some of the things we do in sbt just fundamentally won't 
  work in Maven, otherwise I'd have tried them.
  If you'd like my branch list of broken experiments, I can 
  share them, but be assured that I personally was an sbt 
  hater before learning the tool.

  All of the complaints of syntax and documentation DO 
  represent a younger project vs. a more mature one.  
  However, architecturally, I'm placing my money on sbt over 
  maven.  THat's not to say sbt is perfect, but I think most 
  of these complaints are adressible.