I understand where you are coming from and had similar experience. After learning a fair bit of web-development, I feel R should focus on an analytics oriented

I understand where you are coming from and had similar experience. After learning a fair bit of web-development, I feel R should focus on an analytics oriented path. R just isn't designed for a web-app. Web-apps are much better and faster developed in more focussed languages / frameworks (node/python/django/express, etc) and can be seamlessly integrated to leverage R modules / scripts.