You just copy and pasted the output of giter8's black magic* and asked me if I think the resulting magical incantation is too difficult? Look at Scalatra's installation steps: http://www.scalatra.org/getting-started/installation.html. They don't even give you the sbt dependency. They just direct you to the tool that generates it for you. -- A tool that's only used for a couple other dozen projects: https://github.com/n8han/giter8/wiki/giter8-templates.

Even if you typed that in by hand, you sure took a big detour on your journey of simply declaring "I just want the latest version of Scalatra that works so I can begin coding" by having to go specify Jetty version 7.6.0.v2012012759 and friends.

I don't find it "too difficult". Rather, it's just confusing, nontrivial, and it obstructed my progress with Scala.

*I know g8 just copies down a project from Github like https://github.com/scalatra/scalatra-sbt.g8/blob/master/src/..., but having tools that generate input for other build tools is along my point.