My daughter is in grad school, learning programming for the first time in her life. She's learning R and Python at the same time. She's finding R much more intuitive.
The typical programmer's boggled response to R, somewhat like their response to SQL or CSS, is that most of the languages they look at are descended from C, and anything that is not looks weird. Rather like someone who knows only Indo-European languages encountering a non-IE language for the first time.
Of course, any real-life language, whether R or CSS or SQL or C or anything else, has plenty of actual defects to complain about. Like, for example, "=" meaning "change the thing on my left to be the same as what's on my right". But if it's the same defects that you're used to, you don't see them as much.