I agree about fractals looking very similar after a while. I have seen some truly artistic fractal images created by people who also create art using non-digital tools. My hobby is "generative" digital art, and I prefer to write 99% of the code myself in order to feel that the result is truly my creation.
Scala had some of the same design goals as Ruby, especially the goal of being a pleasant language to live in on a daily basis. Mirah essentially removes the (theoretically, at least) performance advantage that Scala had over JRuby. Of course there is the issue of not being able to use MRI Ruby code with Mirah; overcoming that in a clean way would bring a lot of MRI folks over to Mirah.