That was indeed a fun talk!
I am doubtful if writing a compiler from scratch will be an easier path. The surface syntax of Haskell alone is just very big, but mostly boring to implement, and most of it already exists in Hugs. So – unless you have a reason to write that new compiler anyways – the question is whether it is less (or more fun!) work to implement a lot in Haskell, or to implement a few remaining bits in C.
Now, if someone would anyways pursue the goal of writing an independent compiler for other reasons, and if one would pay a bit attention to keeping it bootstrappable, and that eventually is good enough to bootstrap GHC, maybe that would be most realistic path forwards?.