I appreciate how frustrating this situation can be. As you indicate, this is a tricky problem to solve. One challenge is that R packages themselves do not self-identify their system dependencies accurately. Another challenge is that every Linux installation is a bit different.
However, we are working very hard on this problem. We recently announced RStudio Package Manager. We plan as a future feature of this product to provide better insight into what system dependencies are required by sets of R packages. Eventually, we'd like to support customers who wish to generate and cache Linux binaries.