Is there any way to trick ghc into causing CAFs to be re-evaluated upon each reference to them? (specifically without adding arguments to it so that it is no longer a CAF).

I know this sounds like a dodgy hack ...

Apart from hacking the compiler to remove the update frame from CAFs (which isn't difficult), no. In GHCi you can cause CAFs to be thrown away after each evaluation by saying ':set +r'. Cheers, Simon