You are not enumerating your trade-offs very well. There are natural
conflicts. What is you really want?
- Being able to pre-build and distribute? We have done that since the last
5C1990s with .deb packages.
- Being able to install with minimal size? Have you queried your users? I
note that among the Docker containers for R (in the "Rocker" project Carl and
I run) the _larger_ ones containing RStudio plus optionally "lots from
hadley" plus optionally lots of rOpenSci tend to me _more_ popular (for ease
of installation of the aggregate).
And while share the overall sentiment a little bit, you have to realize that
it is 2016 with the corresponding bandwith and storage:
edd at max:~$ du -csh /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/
1.5G /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/
1.5G total
edd at max:~$
And that it _outside_ of R itself, or the (numerous) other shared libraries.