R is a trash of a language. It doesn't have any sense of coherency to it at all. They keep trying to fix the underlying problems by ducktaping paradigms on to it over and over (S3, S4, R6, etc). There's never a clear sense of the best way to do anything, but plenty of options to do a thing in a very hacky 'script-kiddy' way. Looking out at the community of different projects it becomes clear that everyone is pretty lost as to what design principles should be used for certain tasks, so every repo has its own way of doing things (I know personal style occurs in other languages, but commonalities are much less recognizable in R projects). It's tragic that such a large community uses it.