Thank you, I haven't actually tried that. I really live the "I just want my IDE to work" philosophy (out of laziness), so I try to avoid configuration if I can. :)
About monadic style: I realize that it's a hard sell, but it's basically about leveraging for comprehensions (aka. do-notation) to specify your build. Shake is an example of this, although probably not particularly suited to building Scala code.
PS - You may already know this, but you can change IntelliJ's compile output directory [0].
[0] - http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/configuring-module-com...