I think one problem R might have is that the core language is developed in a fairly tight-knit and informal way. There's no equivalent to Python's PEP process, say. For a young language the informality might be an advantage, but for an older one the risk is that the core developers become a bit insulated from the community of users.
> the risk is that the core developers become a bit insulated from the community of users
I think I like that actually. The core is quite conservative, meanwhile the packages that the average R community member uses break their own backwards compatibility every few months for silly reasons like renaming an argument `linewidth` instead of `size` in a function that was otherwise backwards compatible for a decade.
