One interesting line of development would be to spin off the core functionality into a separate library, to provide no-op services to other Haskell applications.

Actually this would be useful, and probably belongs in Control.Monad (although I'd call it "noOp" rather than "noop"). I was recently working on code that took monadic actions as parameters, so that under the right circumstances the appropriate action would be executed. On several occasions I had to pass "return ()" as a null action. Having an explicit "noOp :: Monad m => m ()" would have made the code shorter and clearer. Paul.