> /lapply/sapply/tapply/vapply madness gives a feeling of hacks taped together just enough so that the thing does not fall apart

Hard to argue against that when the argument for whether to pass to simplify2Array or leave the result as a list is:

sapply(..., simplify = )

but is

mapply(..., SIMPLIFY = )

It kinda reminds me of English pronunciation as far as consistency of conventions goes