I believe the danger is in doing something that is 98% "there" like WSL is currently. The Ubuntu distro that I placed on my system is similar to this... almost there but not quite. Things that work, work well and things that don't work.... well they can be made to work if there is sufficient time and energy spent on them. Computer languages is an area to watch out for (Python, Ruby, etc.). They are not complete and can be a big time suck to get it working. WSL is like having two independent computers inside one computer. It is similar to an epileptic patient that has had their nerve bundle severed and become in essence two people with one brain and body. Although I like the separation, I would like for them to be able to talk with each other.
However, the discussion is really about GIT (clone) and vcpkg. It can be about Mono and Cmake too These programs are the "holy grail" because they point to an automated way of doing things. The topic of interest to me is "what do you do before there is an R system set up to gain efficiency?", I will ask other R and RStudio questions too, but they will be a lot more basic. You may want to put these package on first before you install R and RStudio if they make it easier to install all packages. Otherwise, you'll be in the same place I was trying to install many packages independent or R and RStudio. 5000 packages is a lot of packages that come with R, but it is by no means all of them.
I have seen that R and RStudio has efficiency built in once it is set up. For instance, in the tesseract webpage so kindly provided by jcblum, there is a reference to how to do a lot of something rather than one. The command "text <- ocr("http://jeroen.github.io/images/testocr.png")" is an example. The .png file can be of any size. I am interested in other productivity enhancers inside of R and RStudio, but I am a newbie and don't know how to ask for them. I am so lame that I was trying to run the first command "install.packages("tesseract")" in powershell or cmd until I remembered that these are probably R commands.
I would like to thank jcblum for pointing out to me that the "grey" that I was seeing was because the topic hadn't changed since my last visit. I don't know and pointing this out provides me with a lot of guidance.