> Trying to debug a memory leak caused by insufficient strictness --- why do I need to care about this? The runtime should just take care of it for me; the whole point of a lazy language is that I shouldn't have to care when evaluation happens.

This is a completely wrong assumption. The point of laziness is not so you won't have to care about evaluation order. Everyone would like to have a language in which you don't have to think about evaluation order, but that has proven to be rather hard. Not because the people who invented Haskell or implemented the compilers are idiots who don't know what they're doing, but because it a hard problem to tackle. With many pros and cons on both the lazy and the strict side.

This isn't embarrassing at all. At least you need to think less about evaluation order in Haskell than in most other languages.