I genuinely think these type of thoughts come from having extensive experience as a programmer, that can consider building out systems that might reach the perf

I genuinely think these type of thoughts come from having extensive experience as a programmer, that can consider building out systems that might reach the performance ceiling of R. For 99% of people multicore/distributed architecture will never even be a consideration. But I'm with you, in that having these things from a system engineers perspective would be incredible. There are other implementations of R out there (not just R GNU): Hadley Wickham's discusses them in Advanced R somewhere.