The second error will go away if they reinstall rlang, as you suggest. Having a package fail to load with this kind of error message is not all that uncommon. The yaml thing is a known bug. See Error on opening RStudio.
As for the comparison with SPSS, the people who build R and who build RStudio do things that are brilliant. Sometimes though, the mundane gets less attention. The money one pays for SPSS goes in part to paying people for boring bug fixes.