[dragonwriter]

> Of course, there's also the fact that because all these values are now monads, you can only interact with them through layers of flatMaps

I can easily (and without using any monad specific operations, bind/"flatMap" or otherwise) write a function that interacts with values wrapped in a Maybe monad.

  isJust :: Maybe a -> Bool
  isJust (Just _)  = True
  isJust (Nothing) = False

Of course, I can use monadic operations with any type that is a member of the Monad typeclass, but that doesn't preclude having other alternatives.