Hadley is actively working on ggplot2. In fact, he just tweeted a list of improvements - https://twitter.com/hadleywickham/status/654283936755904512
Also worth pointing out, he's actively working on a new book for ggplot2, which, AFAICT, he's providing for free (you just have to run the build tools)
https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2-book
I think if someone were to run an analysis of Wickham's Github activity, it would produce a freakishly busy chart.
I used to work a lot with R many years ago. I was shocked to find how bad the documentation was, and worse how rude and unfriendly the "community" of grumpy professors was. I shudder to think of the horrible meanness towards beginners asking questions on the mailing list.
I got so fed up I even wrote a book about R data visualisation. But this was all just around the time ggplot2 came out. Unfortunately I stopped using R soon after, but since then Hadley has single-handedly done more good for the language than anyone else.
I don't know what the R community is like now, and whether people like Hadley have made it friendlier, but it's clearly one reason Python is superior.
On the other hand, there seem to be a lot of useful libraries that haven't been ported over to Github or are otherwise easily accessible beyond CRAN...Many of them probably don't get as much exposure as they would if they were more easily discoverable...and I honestly don't even know where, in those cases, to start the bug reporting/patching process. That's obviously the fault of my being spoiled by Github...but that's kind of the point, there's a bit more friction in contributing to R than you might find in Python/Ruby/etc.
The caveat on the ggplot2 book is that building it seems to be really hard because of the nightmare of cross-platform latex. But there will be a physical book out early next year.