Thanks for helping me develop a sense of style! And thanks for noting my mistake above (not sysdata.rds but sysdata.rda).
Would this alternative be acceptable? [My goal here is to avoid "core" being a global variable, that might unexpectedly conflict somewhere else]
get_core <- function() {c("ggplot2", "tibble", "tidyr", "readr", "purrr", "dplyr", "stringr", "forcats")}
core_loaded <- function() {
search <- paste0("package:", get_core())
get_core()[search %in% search()]
}