This is why Hackage is full of junk and Haskell is unapproachable for real-world projects. Everyone's throwaway toy file is published as a package, and the useful well-documented packages get lost in the mix.
Ignoring the baseless FUD in the first part of your post, your last point is actually valid: it is hard to find good, maintained packages on Hackage. Right now the standard solution seems to be just asking somebody with more experience, but this is clearly not scalable.
Happily, a new version of Hackage creatively called Hackage2 is being worked on which should ameliorate this problem (along with some other improvements). Improvement is just around the corner.
