I think the scale of stars/watches is simply different. > I don't know what it's like to develop for CRAN, and it possibly has an advantage in that a maintaine

I think the scale of stars/watches is simply different. > I don't know what it's like to develop for CRAN, and it possibly has an advantage in that a maintainer has to work harder to get it on to CRAN than on to Github...but on the other hand, it doesn't seem as conducive to getting user feedback, which seems critical for rooting out obscure bugs or breaking changes caused by dependencies. Quite a few developers are publishing on CRAN and GH. So engaged users can contribute easily on GH and pull the most recent version to fix the latest bugs while casual consumers of the package can still get a working version from CRAN.