I agree with the broken "Prelude". Fortunately, you can mostly ignore the Prelude and replace it with your own fairly easily. (As you suggest.)
The bigger problem is that strings are broken: by default they are linked lists of Characters. You can use better strings (like Data.Text) and you even get to use them as literals in your source, but the language ecosystem of libraries mostly assumes that you are using the default strings. And converting back and forth is annoying.
Because of all the existing libraries, it's harder to route around [Char] by yourself.
The bigger problem is that strings are broken: by default they are linked lists of Characters. You can use better strings (like Data.Text) and you even get to use them as literals in your source, but the language ecosystem of libraries mostly assumes that you are using the default strings. And converting back and forth is annoying.
Because of all the existing libraries, it's harder to route around [Char] by yourself.