Yep, as someone who both uses lots of R packages and writes lots of R packages (which, in turn, import other R packages), I've grown to appreciate the strictness of CRAN: if a package is on the CRAN, I'm just about guaranteed to not have installation issues or have it screw up my environment. To me, that's the one major job of a package repository, and CRAN does it well, even if it does cause package authors pain at times :)