I wish Haskell had better syntax for records, but to be honest it’s very rare that it actually presents a real issue in practical code that I write. Sure, it can be a bit awkward to update nested records, but I struggle to think of more than a few cases where it’s caused me any real grief, and even then it was only an issue of convenience (having to write a slightly more awkward line of code) as opposed to causing bugs or preventing a satisfactory solution to a problem. I readily admit it’s something that could be improved, but I think it’s more of a hobby horse than a real problem. YMMV of course. For what it’s worth, I’ve written tens of thousands of lines of Haskell over the past few years and have barely ever used lenses. They’re really there as a convenience for people who are familiar with them. Understanding lenses is by no means a prerequisite to writing practical code in Haskell.

I find it hard to co-sign on your assertion that all non-trivial programs require mutation. This hasn’t been my experience at all. While having access to side-effects is certainly essential (which Haskell is fully capable of doing), mutation is quite rarely needed in my experience. In the cases that it is, IORefs are trivial to use. On top of that Haskell has MVars, which I hazard to claim are the best concurrent mutation primitive I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. Quite the opposite of being crippled.