I'm not sure what you are confusing higher order parsers with, but there is absolute no problem with providing a couple of higher order abstractions for error messages. In fact, error messages are much easier to produce that way, than manually.

Are they? I'll be upfront in saying I've never done any actual work with parser combinators (I played with Parsec for about 15 minutes on the train), but I don't see how having direct control is worse. Easier, it may be, but I can only imagine real world situations harder when you get to the nasty stuff in your implementation (e.g. C++ templates basically need to be "run" while being parsed, or lexed even)