Maybe it's because R is heavily used by non-programmers, there is this weird belief that R should be easy to grok by anyone with programming experience, and if they don't immediately get it, it must be R's fault. Of the programming languages I've used, R is much closer in terms of changing your view of programming to Haskell and Lisp (a good chunk of R essentially is a Lisp) than most other 'blub' languages [0]
R certainly has quirks, but most of them come from being one of the oldest programming languages out there (considering it is ultimately an open implementation of S which came out in 1976) and so has a lot of programming patterns that may not be familiar for modern programmers.
Not understanding that R is fundamentally a vector based language and what a vector based language is is akin to approaching Haskell and not having any understanding of Functional Programming, finding no for-loops and saying it's a silly language.
If you are someone who is very curious about programming languages and different programming paradigms, and likes doing numeric/statistical computing, I highly recommend approaching R with a very open mind, and being willing to explore it more carefully. As just one example: one of it's multiple object systems is using Generic functions in the same way that Common Lisp's CLOS does. The best example is R's `plot` function which is a generic function dispatching based on the class of the argument. Again this is something that less experienced programmers see as confusing and stupid, whereas someone with a better understanding of the development of OOP will likely find this very interesting.