shrug. It's largely opinion-based, I guess. My pet peeve (which also illustrates my point, but again, in an opinion-based way): there is no documented, 'officially supported' way to get the path of the current script in R. That is not a problem for amateur programmers who don't think about things like robustness, distribution etc, and it's needlessly complicated and bolted on in SAS, too. But it's still silly and indicative of R's typical use cases. Excel is reliable and well documented too, and I still wouldn't call even complicated workbooks 'software engineering'.

And CRAN... well... let's just say that people used to point to CPAN as a strength of Perl, too... All that sort of archives, after the first few years which comprise mostly of contributors with deep knowledge and who can produce high quality libraries, turn into dumping grounds for trivial half-assed 'libraries' under the guise of 'community contributions'. Example: try to do trivial compound interest simulations in R. So basic that it's barealy worth calling 'finance'. There are (at least) three packages on CRAN that claim to do this, except that (depending on which variable in the equation you want to solve for) they all provide only part of the solution, in mostly incompatible ways. And this is because very few of the people putting code into CRAN know how to... well... write good code. This is not an indictment of those people; many of them are much more intelligent than a bunch of us combined. It's just that for them coding is a byproduct, and with good intentions they share what has been useful for them, it just leads to a situation of 'in the land of the blind one eye is king'.