Cabal spelunking considered tricky

As I've been maintaining cabal-rpm to try to keep up with developments in Cabal, I've found myself wondering why it's not using many of the usual tricks to hide the plumbing, such as a custom monad transformer stack. Some parameters, such as flags, compiler info, and package descriptions, pop up simply all over the place, and they're passed around explicitly. This seems a smidge peculiar. A couple of days with a crowbar and ReaderT StateT IO would do wonders for readability, if anyone feels so inclined :-)