The tooling is not perfect, that's absolutely true. I have to say though that any imperfections (which are going to get fixed anyway) are well worth it if you want a pure strongly typed language for the web. There's simply nothing better (except the full-blown Haskell-to-js compilers, like GHCJS and Haste of course).

I recommend you try again and file a bug or look for help in irc if something breaks again (although I've never seen pulp init throw an error).