Questions to answer in the R-Instat Help file?

[rdstern]

I am starting a blitz on the R-Instat help! One section poses a series of questions. I will be asking Danny and David and others for their views on the answers. They are useful for us all to consider. And tell me if others come to mind.
Some common issues were raised when we started the crowd-sourcing campaign, and as we have been developing R-Instat. We list them here together with our answers.

Why did you bother? There are already so many statistics packages?
Why did you use R? Why not just promote the use of Stata (or another common or free package)?
Why didn't you use an existing "front-end" to R?
Why didn't you start by engaging more with R developers?
Why didn't you start by consulting more with R-users, to find what they needed?
Why did you insist on developing most of the code in Africa?
Why did you use data frames rather than data tables?
Why haven't you optimised your code better?
Why did you use VB.NET for the front-end?
Why did you only develop for Windows computers?