Increasingly, I've had discussions with folks about the merits of including non-base R code into work flows - especially in the context of making packages and reproducibility. Considering the prominence and general expression of best practices of RStudio products (e.g., tidyverse), I'm wondering if there are any talks between RStudio and the R Foundation to make things like the tidyverse a permanent part of the base R distribution. Personally, that kind of action would make me feel a little bit easier about using RStudio packages in work flows I'm developing.
I've started writing my take on it, but then remembered that @hadley already answered it: Q: Do you expect the tidyverse to be the part of core R packages some day? A: It’s extremely unlikely because the core packages are extremely conservative so that base R code is stable, and backward compatible. I prefer to have a more utopian approach where I can be quite aggressive about making backward incompatible changes while trying to figure out a better API.
Source - https://www.quora.com/Do-you-expect-the-tidyverse-to-be-the-part-of-core-R-packages-some-day
I don't understand how you can use R effectively without installing any CRAN packages. The CRAN package ecosystem is one of the biggest advantages of R. You have to accept that you will use contributed packages.
The code for all packages on CRAN is open source, just like R. And enough organizations have invested enough time and money in R that I doubt the tidyverse will be abandoned anytime soon. If Hadley and R Studio vanished from the Earth, somebody else would take over maintenance of the packages.
This goes for all packages on CRAN. If a maintainer ever leaves, you could (a) hope somebody else steps up as maintainer, (b) fix and share the code yourself, or (c) contract programmers who fix and share the code.
Also, what do you consider "Rstudio packages?" There are very few packages that actually require Rstudio the IDE or Rstudio the company, and most people never program with them.