@hoelk Care to give an example for reshape2? I've never used reshape2 for anything other than the exact melt/gather and cast/spreading I've been using tidyr for now.
As for plyr, I had been looking for ages to find a replacement for plyr::ldply within dplyr, but then purrr::map_df came along and all was well 
With regards to the OP: I too would be curious about a "history lesson", with a package evolution, timeline, and seeing where influences come from.
Maybe tidyverse authors have some spare time and can put together a blogpost / some viz for curious folk like us?
EDIT: Just thinking, but is tidyselect and/or rlang related to lazyeval? I never quite wrapped my head around lazyeval, but it seems the new way of doing things is the rlang stuff with the quo() and the !!! and whatnot.