I wonder who is that we you refer to. Is applicative a Bourbaki-style pseudonym for a group of aspiring Haskell hackers?

I never said it is bad, it looks like a useful and convenient mechanism. My complaint is about its non-genericity. Indeed, it is limited to numeric literals only; even to reuse it for string literals, you need a compiler extension.

A general coercion, understood as something different from a function (pack, unpack), would have to coerce between two types of wildly different structures.

By general coercion, I mean implicit conversion not limited to numeric literals (or string literals, with an extension) only.