Why do you say that? Applicatives are perhaps easier and open up Foldable/Traversable, but Monads are just everywhere. As the de facto default functor sequencing method, I'd recommend people start there.
Using Haskell in Production at Standard Chartered, we are seeing Applicatives crop up everywhere. For example, almost all of the time, our parsers (and even IO) need to be used only as Applicative, or at most as Alternative.
Applicatives also compose in interesting ways as opposed to Monads.
