No. The goal is to be useful in both research and industry by means of principled design based on mathematics and engineering. If that scares you, fine, you don't have to be interested in everything. If you think everything that's not designed to appeal to some notion of an "average programmer" is necessarily obfuscated and impossibly difficult, that's on you. Go ahead and avoid it.
No it is not. Haskell appeals to a certain audience, for the same reason that assembly and C/C++ appeal to a certain audience (fun fact: this category pattern will also be available in C++17 to be known as Concepts).
Sure, it is a niche language, and might have too steep a learning curve for the average programmer, but it is used in production, by real world businesses, and people write real world code with it.
That's a noble idea. Knowing this also makes it easier for me to chose to avoid reading articles about it.