CRAN has very different social structures and culture than other languages' package repos. CRAN _will_ pull your package from the repository if you fail to play nice with all packages, for example. This is evidently controversial, but it's accepted practice and one possible explanation for why CRAN feels more cohesive than NPM or PyPI.

I remember the controversies well :) but I guess even their extra gating is starting to creak by the sounds of it.