Edit: This is FUD and I kind of feel offended by it, though I'm not sure that is rational
I'm not a math major. I am a web dev. I want to use Haskell (and am using in a smaller capacity) because it means I have to be up late fixing things less. It means that I can worry about my sites getting hacked less because of the strong static typing guarantees which protect me against csrf.
On top of all that type annotations are great for documenting things. On top of that, composing functions and monads can allow you to do things much safer and much more quickly.
There are many teaching resources which show how some of Haskell's perceived cons can be pros such as these:
http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Haskell-the-Hard-Way...
http://book.realworldhaskell.org/
http://adit.io/posts/2013-04-17-functors,_applicatives,_and_... (with web dev applicable example) http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H...
Honestly from my experiences in #haskell on freenode, /r/haskell, and Haskell related content on the web it seems like many more people are using it with the intent to make "real world software".
I haven't gotten the ivory tower vibe from anyone in the Haskell community yet. Quite the opposite actually, everyone seems very pragmatic.