You can learn about the theory that underlies tidyeval at https://adv-r.hadley.nz/quasiquotation.html. I'd claim that it's neither reinventing the wheel (because it solves problems that the base equivalents do not) nor bizarre (because it is backed by a deep, well-founded theory).
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.
The fact that there is a human (and one with expertise in R) reviewing each incoming package makes pure vibe coded slop much, much harder to get approved.
Even though I've dealt with this, I'm genuinely appreciative of requirements: out of many stipulations, packages that monkeypatch are prohibited (I have a few ones that add diagnostics to advance analyses), online API access needs robust error handling... and there is a conformance/diagnostic suite.
Yep, as someone who both uses lots of R packages and writes lots of R packages (which, in turn, import other R packages), I've grown to appreciate the strictness of CRAN: if a package is on the CRAN, I'm just about guaranteed to not have installation issues or have it screw up my environment. To me, that's the one major job of a package repository, and CRAN does it well, even if it does cause package authors pain at times :)
We do discount heavily for academia: get 50% off for research and 100% off (i.e. free) for teaching. But I do get that our pro products largely solve problems that folks encounter in larger enterprises, and you may not see the value inside an academic department. I'm also always happy to learn how we could do better, please feel free to reach out to [email protected].
Thank you for the response! My key recommendation is to unbundle. At one point we have been told "It got 35% more expensive, but it does so much more now it supports Python" - we didn't ask for Python. To effectively use Connect with private packages you need this other full-blown institutional Package Manager license, 99% of your users will not need. Also per-named-user pricing (rather than per active seat) is so aggressive. A user uses a shiny app once in a year, still need a full per year license.... I feel Posit is one of the most agressive companies in terms of upselling, while positioning as this benevolent PBC / Open-Source institution - just go full Oracle at least we will know where things stand.
