Sure! It's brought lots of neophytes into the language, who don't really understand base R. That's a problem of success. If we were still stuck using interfaces

Sure! It's brought lots of neophytes into the language, who don't really understand base R. That's a problem of success. If we were still stuck using interfaces like base::reshape, base::merge and (shudder) the lattice package, then there'd be fewer users and they'd all be more expert by necessity.