To be honest, I can feel the "cultishness" you mentioned, but I'm curious if you also feel that for R Markdown products (which are mostly irrelevant to Tidyverse). If you do, I'd love to try my best to fix that, because that's something that I personally don't like. I want to make it clear that if you don't use R Markdown, you are definitely not doing anything wrong, e.g., LaTeX and HTML are totally legitimate and supported:
I'm one of the main developers of R Markdown. As @jcheng said, it is definitely not our intention to lock you in RStudio for any of our R packages. You probably can't imagine how hard I have been trying to avoid relying on RStudio specifically for certain features. There are decisions that I can definitely make in favor of the RStudio IDE, but usually I don't do that, and hope things also work well with other editors. Pretty much everything you do in the RStudio IDE for R Markdown documents or projects can be done in command line. It's not possible that a document is no longer reproducible just because you stop using RStudio.
We have tried for almost four years without success: https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown/issues/1020 We did hear back from Github for a few times, but there has been no sign of progress at all. We will truly appreciate it if anyone can connect us to a Github contact to push this forward.
Well, you might be too optimistic about people not commenting on R. Usually I tend to avoid reading HN, but I feel pretty much every single time when someone brings up anything related to R, some people will start mentioning how terrible R is, sooner or later :) Now people also start fighting around Tidyverse, although I have no idea why that's relevant to R Markdown...
I'm still single today, and I don't know why.
(Just kidding :)