Nobody's pretending that everything is "hunky-dory" with Cabal--there are concerted efforts at fixing the problems, and discussions on it come up often both on the mailing list and on /r/haskell. However, some people are pretending that it's worse than it really is. It's not perfect, but it's certainly not bad enough to not use Haskell!

I remember having annoying problems with Python--both easy_install and pip--just a year ago. Perhaps it's better now, but that just means packaging issues can be fixed. And, for Haskell, people are fixing them.