Pardon my shooting from the hip here, but IMO if you're using R for something radically different than statistical analysis and data visualization, you're probably better off using a tool/language that's more purpose-suited.
> As someone who basically uses R as a nice LISP-y scripting language to orchestrate calling low-level compiled code from other languages
When I read this, I think, would `bash` or something equally portable/universally installed work?
R is a beautiful thing when limited to its core uses But in my experience, the more we build away from those core uses, the more brittleness we introduce. I wish the Posit team would focus on the core R experience, resolve some of the hundreds of open issues on its core packages in a timely way [0,1], and just generally play to R's strengths.