I think these days F# is probably a big more polished than what you remember, so perhaps it's worth giving it another shot.

Being a hosted language always requires certain compromises (something that was also apparent in Scala). I used to do Scala professionally in its early days, but for me it felt it added just as much complexity as it addressed. I focused on Clojure back then (on the FP side at least), and I do think that F# probably brings more to the table than Scala. (if one is not constrained to Java, that is)

The tooling story is not great, but I've almost never seen great tooling for a language that's not super popular. I'm guessing what you get today with Rider is more or less as good as what VS has to offer.