Joking aside, I'm genuinely confused as to how you survey that many of the site's users and get no one with rep above 10k. Especially considering that high rep users are much more engaged and invested in the site, and so I would expect a much higher response rate from them.
Also a fellow juggler, but I have always felt the opposite, actually. (And have frequently felt like I'm in a minority.)
I could watch technicians practicing 8 balls, 10 rings, crazy site swaps, endless 5 club back crosses, etc. in a gym for hours. I have certainly enjoyed and appreciated the Jay Gilligan and Michael Moschen's of the world, but the overwhelming majority of "artsy" juggling just doesn't work, at least for me. For every Gilligan/Moschen/etc routine that I've seen that I've thought was well done, I feel like I've seen 4-5 that just fall totally flat for me.
At the other end of the spectrum, the "entertainer" jugglers that are aiming for a non-juggling audience I find almost impossible to watch. They are technically uninteresting, and I just can't get into the endless stream of lame jokes and winking at the crowd. Just awful. I would actually much prefer to watch Gatto practice than do one of his Vegas performances. The performances are impressive technically, but I find absolutely nothing about the presentation entertaining.
I think the reason that I feel this way is that I've always enjoyed the process of juggling (figuring how to do something, figuring out techniques for how to break down a trick into pieces, mastering each piece, etc) more than the end result (a polished, performable trick).
Back when I was juggling a lot, once I felt like I mastered a trick, it didn't really hold much interest for me anymore. When actually juggling, I would much rather spend my time trying to eke out a few more catches of 7 than toss 5 around more or less indefinitely.
But like I said, I've often felt like my preferences here are not all that common.
Regarding the adoption rate of S, I think you hit upon a key source of the complaints about R.
R existed in one form or another for a (relatively) small, specialized audience for a long, long time. This included the period where transitioning from S to R included placing a very high priority on maintaining code from S, even being able to replicate the bugs from S. This made a lot of sense from the perspective of a (relatively) small group of statisticians making a data analysis language for their own uses.
Over the last 10 years, R has become massively more popular, and many, many more people are using it outside of its "base" audience. Not surprisingly, many of these new users are discovering that R was not designed with their personal use cases in mind.
Given these constraints, R has done a remarkably good job of adjusting (where it can) to accommodate the diversification in its user base. But you can only go so far without just re-writing it from scratch, and the interests of R Core will always bend towards themselves and their, well, "core" audience.
This is what's really weird to me about every conversation that pops up with people complaining about R. I've been using R daily for nearly 8 years now, and there are plenty of things that I could complain about.
But other people always seem to have big problems with things that never even occurred to me.
In this case, I've been using R to pull data out of SQLite, SQL Server and Oracle db's every single day, for years. And I've never had any problems at all. It wouldn't even occur to me to think that R's ability to get data out of a db was anything other than "just fine".