look, I am all for RTFM but my experience with R has been a different case in my experience. Can I make it do powerful things? yes. can I take code that wont run, copy it to a new file and have it run? yes.

1) There are just quirks in implementation that are nonintuitive. I constantly find myself doing things I would do in other languages, to do simple tasks, which fail for no good reason, albeit an obvious one once I find the right documentation.

2) The manual you describe is flat out unhelpful in many cases. The suggestions that constantly come about "check stack / google" are suggestive of just how poor that documentation is