Had problem with deprecated package, was told my only option was to wipe my Haskell install and start over. Is this true and if so, doesn't this mean that Cabal (or the package management system that it is a part of) is broken?
(in short: yes, it's broken, and probably not fixable. cabal is a friendlyish wrapper for ghc-pkg, which is not a package manager in the sense many people want it to be, and it never will be.)
Something *really* needs to be done about its absurd willingness to blindly override bootlibs and thereby break things, though.