Unfortunately, looking at stars/watchers as a metric is not as effective as it is for more popular languages. R has a lot of great software and community but the software development scene is not at all as populated as it is for Ruby/Python/JavaScript. Look at the repo for ggplot2, which is one of R's most generally useful and best-in-class libraries:
Just 1,500 stars and 200 watchers...stars obviously aren't a reflection of the library's quality or value, but there's at least a correlation with how many people are on Github and who are tracking the package. I don't know what it's like to develop for CRAN, and it possibly has an advantage in that a maintainer has to work harder to get it on to CRAN than on to Github...but on the other hand, it doesn't seem as conducive to getting user feedback, which seems critical for rooting out obscure bugs or breaking changes caused by dependencies.
edit: Speaking of R's github obscurity and Hadley Wickham's work...dealing with time is as frustrating as it is in every other language. Many, many hours were wasted struggling with conversions and only randomly did I stumble across Wickham's lubridate package, which on Github [1] has 181 stars compared to 23,000 and 2,300 for moment.js and Chronic, respectively...and I didn't find it or think to look for it on Github...I think I stumbled across it on a random blog post. I'm not sure how discovery works on CRAN.
I think the scale of stars/watches is simply different.
> I don't know what it's like to develop for CRAN, and it possibly has an advantage in that a maintainer has to work harder to get it on to CRAN than on to Github...but on the other hand, it doesn't seem as conducive to getting user feedback, which seems critical for rooting out obscure bugs or breaking changes caused by dependencies.
Quite a few developers are publishing on CRAN and GH. So engaged users can contribute easily on GH and pull the most recent version to fix the latest bugs while casual consumers of the package can still get a working version from CRAN.
https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2
Just 1,500 stars and 200 watchers...stars obviously aren't a reflection of the library's quality or value, but there's at least a correlation with how many people are on Github and who are tracking the package. I don't know what it's like to develop for CRAN, and it possibly has an advantage in that a maintainer has to work harder to get it on to CRAN than on to Github...but on the other hand, it doesn't seem as conducive to getting user feedback, which seems critical for rooting out obscure bugs or breaking changes caused by dependencies.
edit: Speaking of R's github obscurity and Hadley Wickham's work...dealing with time is as frustrating as it is in every other language. Many, many hours were wasted struggling with conversions and only randomly did I stumble across Wickham's lubridate package, which on Github [1] has 181 stars compared to 23,000 and 2,300 for moment.js and Chronic, respectively...and I didn't find it or think to look for it on Github...I think I stumbled across it on a random blog post. I'm not sure how discovery works on CRAN.
[1] https://github.com/hadley/lubridate