I get your point but there are few alternatives. Python and Julia aren't there yet. (And if they were, they would end up in the same place.) Anything else lacks the variety of packages and isn't really useful for interactive use. You must not forget, R is a tool for statisticians (and one of their presumably modern incarnations) written mostly by statisticians. Useless, error-prone packages will be weeded out sooner or later. The useful ones will improve as time goes by.
I don't know a single package that exposes global variables. I only know packages that expose certain functions and provide some configuration via options. In R, there are no really private variables though. If you want, you can access anything you want. Since everthing is packaged in its own environment, I don't see that as a problem though since the global namespace doesn't get polluted. It won't make people with a background in one of the more modern OOP languages happy but that's probably not that important.
I don't know a single package that exposes global variables. I only know packages that expose certain functions and provide some configuration via options. In R, there are no really private variables though. If you want, you can access anything you want. Since everthing is packaged in its own environment, I don't see that as a problem though since the global namespace doesn't get polluted. It won't make people with a background in one of the more modern OOP languages happy but that's probably not that important.