> I still am not sure I truly understand what a Monad is but I can see the pattern and use it as a tool. It feels more constrained at first but it brings order to chaos.

Ha, I learned Haskell over 6 years ago and I still can't explain what a monad is other than in programming terms. It's a container which defines two operations: put something inside the container (Haskell's "return" keyword), and chain two operations on the container together (Haskell's >>= operator).