Not so unusual, if you come at it from a developer who's experience is in mostly dynamic languages perspective. It can feel like you're fighting the type checker at times, however I found that the reason that's the case is because I'm trying to write dynamic code in a statically typed language. Once I got over that impedance mismatch, Scala became a lot nicer for me.
Funnily, that is one of the problems I've experienced with gradually typed (and optionally typed) systems; you need to have strong discipline to get the most of out them. My personal way of tackling it (in Hack these days) is to strictly type everything, and only rely on dynamic typing where it's absolutely needed.
