I think adding sugar to the prelude module would be a good solution, but the fact that you must include sugar instead of import it as with regular modules is not only weird and (a little) error prone but also exposes new nim users to one new concept (include vs import) way too early.
Nim v2 should make prelude work as a regular import, ensure it does not issue unused import warnings and add sugar and perhaps some other modules. Also, I assume that incremental compilation will help with compile time in this case?