This exactly matches my experience with Elm. You wrote "..how resistant it was to me hacking my way to success"; the same here, I tried to do things my way, and Elm would resist (thankfully) those efforts. It resulted in an easy to maintain, much cleaner code. Initially, I went through a 3 month mental grind to learn FP in Elm to be somewhat productive. Then it suddenly started to flow. A while ago I wrote a variation of Snake game [0], using elm-ui to render the simple graphics. The coding experience was fantastic.
[0]: https://github.com/holobeat/elm-snake