Maven required tons of work because it's written in Java, not because the ideas behind it are advanced in any sense.

It's sounds absurd because it's so simple, but the issue is that Cabal/GHC doesn't deal with versioning. Different versions of the same library are not properly treated as different artifacts. That's why everything breaks if you install it into a global namespace.

"Great, let's just multiply our namespaces!" is the obvious knee-jerk reaction, but not a great solution.

> There are very intelligent people working on this problem

That sounds great! Because until now I have mostly seen "very intelligent people" who have been busily in denial that a problem even exists.