Semantics of sequences in R

in my opinion the point of the whole discussion could be summarized by
the question, what is a design flaw? This is totally subjective, and
it happens almost everywhere in life. Take human languages as an
example and in particular, English. I do not know the history of the
English language but I can guess at some point some people decided
that the past tense for "give" should be "gave" and not "gived"
according to the standard rule, possibly because they thought it has
better acoustic.

Is this a design flaw of English? Some might argue yes, maybe they
would think "gived" does not have a that bad acoustic or they could
have come up with another possibility than "gave". Does this confuse
new users of English? Of course it does -- I had to spent many hours
learning the past tense and past particle of the irregular verbs.
Should it be changed? Then almost all existing code (i.e., English
texts) should be rewritten, which I think demonstrates why some people
are a bit reluctant in design changes.

To close I'd like to share with you a Greek saying (maybe also a
saying in other parts of the world) that goes, for every rule there is
an exception. The important thing, in my opinion, is that these
exceptions are documented.