Agreed - it certainly is rewarding in itself to get to the next level, but that's precisely it: the means become ends in themselves. I stopped using stuff like Arch Linux a while back for similar reasons.
Haskell is a pretty decent general purpose programming language, and if used well you can produce nice programs, but the problem is that the library you need will use some clever type system stuff and suddenly you are spending hours trying to understand how it all works.
For example I'd be happy doing a lot of stuff in the IO monad with some pure bits to the side where needed. Avoid the free monads, monad transformers, type classes and all that jazz. So use it like an imperative language for the most part.