Yeah, for those same reasons I much prefer using Scalding's typed API [1], which feels very similar to Scoobi. The tuple API shown in these slides is great for places like Etsy that already have a large investment in Cascading, but otherwise you're better off getting the added type safety and similarity to the standard Scala API.
[1] https://github.com/twitter/scalding/wiki/Type-safe-api-refer...