Ignoring the baseless FUD in the first part of your post, your last point is actually valid: it is hard to find good, maintained packages on Hackage. Right now

Ignoring the baseless FUD in the first part of your post, your last point is actually valid: it is hard to find good, maintained packages on Hackage. Right now the standard solution seems to be just asking somebody with more experience, but this is clearly not scalable. Happily, a new version of Hackage creatively called Hackage2 is being worked on which should ameliorate this problem (along with some other improvements). Improvement is just around the corner.