alt Hacker NewsCRAN is not a conventional package repo. Its audience is not really people who care about programming or software. It is a means to an end for them and slop is perfectly fine. The language itself is also very simple and has defaults that people don't even bother changing. For example the default output file name. It doesn't ask for an output file name when you save output.
As a result of the above, it is full of packages that come with associated datasets right in the package itself. Packages with a tiny script and gigabytes of data. Or perhaps just the data without any actual code.
Very weird universe.
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CRAN is a weird universe, but not (just) for the reasons you mention. CRAN is still heavily human maintained which means that there's a high chance that an actual human will look at your packages (at least for your first package). This imposes a considerably higher barrier to entry than most package repos, and hence I suspect CRAN actually has a considerably lower percentage of slop.
OK you are right but that is selective for an "overview". The attention to documentation has always been outstanding for substantial packages. The culture is to make many repetitive steps into one liner "magic" that sometimes is very very useful; lastly, the completeness of advanced statistical methods in standard libraries is real. ps- I do not like the R language at all myself, but to be fair there are reasons it is widely used in higher ed.
> For example the default output file name. It doesn't ask for an output file name when you save output.
I'm not really sure what output file even means for an interpreted language, but GCC doesn't ask either, it will spit out an a.out by default (not even .elf or something logical).