Most people writing Haskell code for real problems should never write their own instances of Monad. When you see someone implementing tons of instances of Monad

Most people writing Haskell code for real problems should never write their own instances of Monad. When you see someone implementing tons of instances of Monad, it's a sign of over-engineering and Haskell masturbation. Very, very few people are good enough to judiciously understand when and where to write their own instances. In the majority of cases you should merely be using instances of Monad which solve extremely common problems, like Maybe, List, State, Reader, Writer, and sometimes "functions of a common argument" `((->) r)`. The function one is perhaps the trickiest to understand. For these examples of Monad, it's really not much work to learn how to apply them. Even just reading LYAH gets you pretty far. You could almost just pretend it is a DSL for composing units of work in each of the classic problems that motivate them (e.g. passing stateful computing, doing non-deterministic computation on a list, etc.). But I do agree this becomes a huge problem when you join a team and they've architected skyscrapers of customized Monads to do routine stuff. That's a very poor way to build systems in Haskell unless you can guarantee every person on the team is a Haskell expert (hint: you can't). Your comment strikes me more as a downside of the oneupsmanship of the Haskell community than a problem with Haskell itself.