And I wouldn't say it's anything specific to Haskell: I've seen a lot of times in other languages people trying to flesh entire libraries around a domain-specific primitive that go far beyond their current needs.
I'd say the Haskell community (its focus) is more "at fault" here, encouraging these kinds of exploratory rabbit-hole-diving. Though, to be fair, there are people there with get-shit-done mentality (github/bos and github/ocharles come to mind) and I see more of that kind coming in lately.
Pick the weakest structure that will satisfy your current needs and move on. (by ocharles, paraphrased)
By implication, this happens because the more complicated details of a project (e.g. designing a nuclear reactor in the original) or community are complicated and the domain of specific experts, and arguing about peripheral details (the color to paint the bike shed) is a way for the non-experts to show contributions.
Which framing works best depends on the context. When I'm having fun, or trying to learn, exploring abstractions is deeply edifying.
When I'm on the clock, though, any time I spend on "expanding the program's power" beyond the minimum necessary to get the job done is wasteful.
It's fair to question the tool in this case. As programmers we rely on our tools to provide abstractions that free our minds from thinking about details that don't matter. If the tool (or perhaps the culture around using the tool) insists that we deal with details we're not interested in or don't care about, perhaps the tool is not the best one for the task at hand.
To me, it’s fun to achieve a goal — programming to solve a real problem, implementing something that I can use or others can. It’s super fun when my program works, has no bugs, it’s cute and nice.
To others, the act itself of programming is funnier than actually doing something useful, so that you can deep dive into the best way of programming without actually doing something useful if not a program complex enough to use whatever programming feature you want to have meta-fun with.
