>and perhaps fully grokking these essential constructs before moving on to using them indirectly through all the layers of pretty syntax would have helped me understand all those features better.

This is the approach we take in our book, Haskell Programming from First Principles. (http://haskellbook.com/) The book starts with a _brief_ introduction to lambda calculus and builds on what the reader knows incrementally. You can see in our chapter listing: http://haskellbook.com/progress.html what order we do things in. Importantly, it's not just show & tell. The book has _a lot_ of exercises and detailed explanation for the concepts covered.

I'd worked with and taught quite a few people before starting the book, in addition to maintaining a fairly popular guide (https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell) for learning Haskell and helping people working through the recommended materials. Further, my coauthor on the book was completely new to programming when she began working with me. What we cover and in how much detail is influenced by working with her, our ~10 deep-dive reviewers, and the over 1,300 emails of feedback/questions we've gotten from readers.

What I did in the book is based on that experience and data. If I could've written less and still solved the same problems, I would've. Maybe a future edition will be shorter after we refactor some things.