Immature computer language designers borrow; mature designers steal.
Matlab is a horror but one thing they do do well is .* and * for the two multiplies.
Julia also adopted this syntax, and I'm not sure if I like it. In numpy at least, I find myself doing element-wise multiplication much more frequently than matrix multiplication, so '.*' always feels clumsy. I'd rather have special syntax for the matrix multiply (and I was a long time matlab user before moving to numpy).
I have not witnessed this behavior, but it would be perfectly logical to dismiss R while absorbing its features – R is a domain-specific language (statistics) while Python is a general purpose programming language. A GP language will always have a larger useful scope than a DSL.
Calling R a DSL is like insisting that Python is just a scripting language.
Sure, the facilities for statistics and plotting are well exposed. But all the features you need for 'general purpose' are in there too, and they aren't awkward to access (at least, relative to anything else).