Alternative to type family Any

In GHC HEAD, Any is no longer a datatype. There are good reasons for this change, one of which was explained in #9097 (closed), the original ticket, and another in #9380 (closed). Unfortunately, a casualty of this change is that it is no longer easy to generalize the rank1dynamic package to rank-1 types with type variables of arbitrary kind (not just *). We submitted a way to do so here, that exploits the fact that Any has the very magical property of inhabiting *all* kinds, including closed ones.

This works for GHC 7.8, but won't work in HEAD, because we require that there exists a Typeable instance for Any, just as there are Typeable instances for any other type one wishes to have instances for. The reason is that now that Any is a type family, Any is no longer a legal instance head.

There are several possible solutions that I see:

• while it's clearly dangerous for the compiler to be inserting the old Any during typechecking from the moment that we have computation in types over closed kinds, we may still want the old Any, say under a different name, as a backdoor. It wouldn't be used by the compiler during type checking - only by packages such as rank1dynamic. I believe that furthermore, if we restrict the old Any to not inhabit closed kinds, then none of the problems cited in the above tickets arise.
• Instead of making the new Any a type family, keep it a datatype, but ban it from inhabiting closed kinds. I don't know if such an Any would be sufficient for the purposes of GHC, however.
• Hardwire a Typeable instance for the Any type family (not sure if this makes sense).