One has to learn how to deal with cabal anyway
Nah, I haven't used cabal-install in years now. Because of hpack, you don't even need to write .cabal files.
The only time I touch cabal is when I need to write Setup.hs files, which is, mercifully, quite rare.
Interesting. I would advice to start with plain cabal. One has to learn how to deal with cabal anyway, so there's no point adding stack on top of it from the start.