This is by design of Haskell, and you aren't arguing with me (beyond being offended by my hyperbole). My trouble with using Haskell on small projects means I would probably never go near it on large projects, it prefers people who "think to program" while I'm more of a "program to think" type.
What were your problems using it on small projects? If it wasn't obvious, "large projects" is a proxy for "have you actually tried to use it at any practical level?". FWIW, I had a lot of difficulty with Haskell at the start, but "easy to learn" doesn't necessarily translate into "a lot of power", but I found that Haskell gave me incredible power at the cost of a steep learning curve. It's not for nothing that they call it the best imperative programming language.
Oh, and don't worry, I would never pull the I'm offended by X card! I don't get offended easily, and I don't think you do either ;). This is all friendly argumentativeness (is that a word?) as far as I'm concerned, I hope you feel the same.
I worked on lots of small haskell projects as a student, wrote ocaml at Jane St and spent the past few years working in clojure full time. I definitely felt the need for a debugger in every one of those languages.
Equational reasoning is useful but it is still reasoning that I have to do. The whole point of having a computer is for it to do some of the thinking for me.
I think there is a certain kind of person naturally attracted to Haskell. I once attended an working group meeting [1] with many of the top Haskell people (e.g. SPJ), and I came to the realization that they were super smart and their brains were just wired very differently from mine. But I also thought a lot of effort was spent on solving problems elegantly in Haskell that were otherwise very easy to solve in other programming environments.
It is not the learning curve that gets me; I know many languages already, some of them with very steep curves. It is the thought processes that the language promotes, the order that it forces me to write my programs, the flow doesn't suit me well. I want the freedom to work at my own rhythm.
