"BUT to say I gave up on a language because it has so many options is strange to me."

This is a regular concern in designing a programming language. Give coders too much freedom and they invent 20 ways to do the same thing, none really clearly better than the other. Restrict the freedom and there's more like 3-4 ways to do something, and usually one is better then the rest.

As a new user to R, I must say that the single hardest thing has been learning all the different ways to do something. Each blog/stackoverflow/etc... article I read seems to propose 5 different ways to do each thing. At the end of it, I'm left not really knowing how things work best.