The R development community is (was?) consciously focused on single operator managing their stuff on their workstation.

Considerations like repeatable procedures, reliable package heirarchies, etc. were clearly and more or less politely Not Interesting. I spent several years with one of my tasks being an attempt to get the R package universe into Gentoo, and later to RPM packages.

I wouldn't say the R devel community was rude about it, but the systems-administration view of how to maintain the language was just not on their radar.

At the time I was trying to provide a reliable taxonomy of packages to a set of research machines at a good sized university. Eventually, I gave up on any solution that involved system package managers, or repeatability. :)

So if you're a researcher driving your own train, R is freakin' FANTASTIC. If you're the SA attempting to let that researchers' department neighbors do the same thing on their workstations, anticipate fun.