I see your point and would not call my view naive. It is based on where R is at the moment. It is not that R can't become a general purpose language, it can. It is just that there are better options out there if you want to develop applications and applications are not what R was designed for or is good at. For now at least. That said, if people who are interested in using R to develop applications, like yourself, want to improve the language to compete with the likes of Python, by all means do it. The field needs people like you who are interested in doing that.
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R community is made up of statisticians and biologist and economists and financial analysts, data analysts. Only a fraction of it actually are computer science people.
While other languages have less of us and more of computer science or programmer.
So I don't think even if I have intention I would ever be able to help you or R in this respect...
I use SPSS to get a fast glimpse on the data and variables in survey data. The variable and data view in SPSS is just much faster and clearer than R's or Rstudio's methods.
I've had problems when dealing with large datasets, at the end I need to use some external database and only use R to work with small subsets.