Thank you! I definitely agree with you regarding the idiomatic solutions.

However, the only defense I can come up with (not that I really want to excuse myself) is this is part of an effort (Hakit) to make Haskell web development accessible to HS beginners. I was a beginner myself when I started Hakit, a web toolkit, and I was overwhelmed by the seemingly complex Haskell APIs. So I tried to build a complete toolkit while forcing the users learning as few Haskell concepts as possible, without writing exceedingly ugly code.

I will surely try to make this more appealing to Haskell ninjas too though.