One time I was struggling with some odd R behavior of the sort described by the author. I asked my local R expert. He told me how to fix my program, but I protested that none of it made any sense, even when explained. He didn't disagree, he just laughed and said "don't worry about it."

That works great for him, he can "not worry about it" and things work because he knows all the quirks.

If I just "don't worry about it" my programs don't work for mysterious reasons.

It seems likely that R could have been designed to have the same strengths without having so many weird and arbitrary quirks.