Dependency management, in my opinion, is one of the problems in the R ecosystem. The lack of name spaces when calling functions has made the community have many little packages that only do one thing on you are not really sure where it was actually used, unless you know the code and the package.

An example is the janitor::clean_names function I like to use for standardizing the column names on a data.frame.

However, the tidyverse is really serious in terms of api consistency and functional style, with pipes and purrr's functionalities. The unixy style of base R is unproductive in terms of fast iterating an analysis. Also, the idea of "everything in a data frame" (or tibble, with list columns and whatnot) together with the tidy data principles really takes the cognitive load off to just get things started.