I came to Haskell with no understanding of monads, started writing code, and eventually used my knowledge of Haskell to learn about monads. Not understanding monads just meant I was lacking a useful design pattern, and found certain API docs confusing, but it didn't stop me from writing reasonable code in most circumstances.
On the other hand what you describe in your (awesome) blog post is a more significant Haskell project than any I've worked on, so I'd be interested to hear your experience.
I've not really written my own monad, or properly looked into monad transformer stacks, and I'm aware that I could probably clean up a lot of code using them - is that the sort of thing you mean?
