I'll admit that as someone who has a package on CRAN, has been using R since ~2001 and who is a normal software developer in their day to day job that the lack

I'll admit that as someone who has a package on CRAN, has been using R since ~2001 and who is a normal software developer in their day to day job that the lack of standardization is something I'm guilty of. For me what happened was that my thoughts on appropriate naming, structure, etc has evolved over the 6 (I think?) years of the package's existence but I simply haven't had the time to make the wholesale changes necessary. It's on my todo list, but frankly things like "fix actual bugs" have been sitting on that list for a very long time as well. In general though, I've always found that most packages are pretty crappy and not just for code quality. With a relatively small amount of exceptions what I found over the years was that if you needed to do something it was almost always better to write something yourself than shoehorn someone else's junk into your system. There's an exception w/ Bioconductor, particularly the packages created and maintained by the core devs. And on your point about the renaissance, yes I believe that has been happening, largely driven by Hadley Wickham.