[tel]

I think generally the point is that "forgetting to a generic" is a dangerous operation because recovering that forgotten information is risky. It's inconvenient, but the alternatives are worse. Reflection, especially universally, blows up the amount you can trust your types very significantly.

Your Frobnicate example is interesting since you want an extra level of polymorphism in there, but getting this can be bad for inference (see MultiParamTypeClasses without functional dependencies). In any case, it's not clear why you ought to expect it to work.