I noticed this also .. and this is why I chose to "rip" some packages for some of its functionality.
>From what I observed the problem is the "coolness" of the language and the highly creative level of the package writers. Just as the first post here states the seemingly two advantages , cool language and super-creative package writers .. can some time have a "babel tower" effect. I encountered this with respect to image processing geometry primitive manipulation etc .. the problem is: too many types!! if something can be represented as an array with some convention for example MxN array where M is the Descriptor size and N is the number of Descriptors .. then it is better to use and support that than to declare more specialized types. At least for fast paced research and idea validation it is better. Probably for implementation and performance specialized types optimized for speed will be required..
