It might be nice to be able to compose monads some other way than transformers, but I don't know what that would be. Transformers are unwieldy, yes, but they're

It might be nice to be able to compose monads some other way than transformers, but I don't know what that would be. Transformers are unwieldy, yes, but they're also completely trustworthy. If you try to assemble them randomly, without thinking about it, yes, you will have a bad time, in much the same way that you will have a bad time if you try building any abstraction without thinking about it. Yes, they can be a useful abstraction (just like anything else); I have the same sort of feeling about your response as I have about "checked exceptions are evil".