[tomrod]

I've wrapped R to python before. That was okay, a bit stilted but still could take to production if absolutely necessary.

You're 100% right that R is great for data scientists (my background) for frontier level academic implementations as well as toy/simple models. It's generally a poor runtime for computation and suffers from much of the same issues as Python for data quality and typing. Python is better for battle-hardened type stuff, has better debugging tools for certain.

R _can_ be done well, but the juice isn't worth the squeeze typically.