The explosive growth of R has downsides too. What's the number of contributed packages? A language with 10 extras can't be taken very seriously as a general environment. One with 100 or 1000 or 10000 is more serious. But 100,000 would just be confusing to almost everyone. Also, R seems to be fracturing: already quite different ways to do graphics, and then there's tidyverse that seems to be polarising.
github.com/matloff/TidyverseSkeptic is one sample.