Joseph Rickert shows a consequence of lowering the bar for application development:
If you are reading this post on R-bloggers, you will probably know that I have been publishing my selection of the “Top 40” new R packages on CRAN for quite some time. I did this first as part of my work at Revolution Analytics, then on R Views for RStudio and Posit, and now here on R Works. It used to take about a day’s worth of pleasurable work spread out over a month to select forty interesting packages. For a hundred or so packages, I could look at all of the package webpages, download and play with a small number of them. Now, the “Top 40” has become a real hamster-on-the-wheel project. The following plot shows my count of the number of new packages to make it to CRAN since I began publishing on R Works.
Click through to see what Joseph has laid out. The part that surprises me is, historically, CRAN was pretty difficult to get a package into and you typically needed to jump through a certain number of quality gates. I suppose that has to have changed given what Joseph notes around the lack of documentation in many of these new packages.. But it could be that my understanding of it was wrong H/T R-Bloggers.