Yes, I feel similarily about the proxy hack. It works very well, but its almost as powerful as straight up kernel code. Sadly, it’s the only approach right now that allows synchronous interop, which is needed in my opinion for internationalization.
I would gladly add a command line/API option to choose between intl-proxy or elm-cldr.
The default should probably be elm-cldr if its features are enough for the given translation sets.
This shouldn’t be a problem to implement, I’m doing the same currently to avoid depending on intl-proxy if it isn’t necessary.