Plenty of "the elite" find monads quite common place and use them effectively for real mainstream programming every day. I might say people in the FP world are

Plenty of "the elite" find monads quite common place and use them effectively for real mainstream programming every day. I might say people in the FP world are much more in touch with the future of programming then most. Languages like Haskell are solving problems (elegantly) that many mainstream programmers have not yet come across but they will.