Curious what troubles you had with R packages? I find R packages the easiest to use of any language; install.packages("<package name>") and library() and you're off the races. I occasionally have library issues with python/ruby; many more still bundling javascript. By contrast R rarely gives me grief.
- R packages are much more likely to include compilation of C libraries, which can cause grief if you're not experienced enough to install specific libs that might be newer than eg what apt provides
- library(package) imports the full package into the global namespace (from package import *) which is fine for small projects but scales poorly
Anaconda largely handles the first problem if you can constrain you package use to its ecosystem though.
For my anecdata the worst R package wasn't any worse than a python package that needed gdal, but I had to deal with these problems easily 5 times more often
