Don't be embarrassed about this. I think it's a very important point. I've heard monads getting buzz outside the Haskell community and it almost always misses

Don't be embarrassed about this. I think it's a very important point. I've heard monads getting buzz outside the Haskell community and it almost always misses the point. I gave a presentation at the NYC Haskell meetup that made essentially the same point as you, but came at it from a different angle. You wrote this post quite awhile earlier, but it's nice to know that we independently came to the same conclusions.