The reason they dropped CLR support was because there was virtually no interest in it.

No, I'm pretty sure the reason they dropped CLR support was that there was no good way to get a decent .NET interop story with a language with a substantially different type system than .NET assumes (particularly, with higher-kinded types) given .NETs reified generics.

This is one respect in which .NET's superiority over the JVM as a platform for its core languages (C#/VB.NET on .NET vs. Java on the JVM) made it worse for flexibility. Reified generics are great for implementing languages with a C#-like-type-system, but they limit the power of the type systems you can have.

No.

Your comment might be more useful if you gave a reason or an argument or some data or something...

F# is a remarkably less powerful language than scala. Along with the cost of Visual Studio + windows licenses, the Scala/open source ecosystem is just a better choice.

For corporations, the cost of Visual Studio and Windows licenses is a drop of water in their ocean budget.

There is enterprise software way more expensive than that.

Corporations for which VS/Win licenses don't matter are usually exactly those which don't let developers use F#. So what's your point?