In other words, "success" (popularity, widespread use in industry, teaching, etc.) is not a justification for "costs" such as limiting expressiveness, making things less safe, restricting research possibilities, etc. Haskell would prefer to be powerful, safe, efficient, obscure and niche; rather than popular, industry-standard, widely-known, highly compatible, unsafe, insecure, inefficient and restricted (besides, we have loads of languages of this sort!).
Crippling the language to make things easier for new users is not an option. However, there are many ways the language could be made easier without impacting any core values. For example, there are long-standing issues with strings, records, error messages, dependency handling, etc. which people are working on.
Also, for those who do want to learn Haskell, I've found the community to be very welcoming and tolerant of newbies. Just ignore some of the more math-heavy blog posts (for now, at least), or your head might explode :P
To your point about making Haskell easier for newbies without impacting the core values... Rust is a great example of that. Rust can be difficult to learn, but the Rust community does a great job of explaining (and re-explaining in many cases) Rust's approach to newcomers. This is especially true when Rust handles a problem in a way that may be counter-intuitive to the inexperienced.
Here's a great example from r/Rust where a new Rust user trashes traits and the Result type: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/4rev26/why_is_rust_ma...
Whilst communicating why and how things work is certainly important (all of the Haskell monad tutorials come to mind!), I was actually refering to cases where "Haskell's approach" is known to be bad.
For example:
http://www.alexeyshmalko.com/2015/haskell-string-types
I'm not a big fan of this whole community splitting action, but to think that it's been undertaken as a coup d'état to take control of the community by a commercial entity is verging on tinfoil hat territory.
And you know what? Stack is a fantastic tool for newcomers, we use it exclusively for our commercial Haskell projects and it's changed our development practices for the better by a long way. Something that built today I can be sure will build in a year without changes - cabal has never been able to guarantee that. I'm really glad someone has put in the huge amount of effort to make a better Haskell build tool, it's been far too long coming.
What makes them "official"?
https://web.archive.org/web/20050728010349/http://www.haskel...
It is in no sense the "official" outlet for GHC. It's an outlet that promoted other people's work, and anyone else is welcome to make a new outlet of their own.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090129200859/http://haskell.or...
which immediately lists implementations and compare it to
https://web.archive.org/web/20100402011002/http://www.haskel...
a year later you will be reminded of the rather spectacular struggles that preceded the ghc-centrism of haskell.org . The change was closely associated with the appearance of the haskell platform, and the arguments very similar to those concerning stack and stackage. If you want paranoid theories of corrupt commercial motives in that case, I can produce several incompatible ones for you to choose among.
The former is now virtually uncompilable (and was never complete), Hugs is officially unmaintained, nhc hasn't seen a release since 2010 so is not under new development.
While there was discussion over this, it doesn't at all resemble the set of arguments more recently.