Finally installed RStudio to my mac to play with it. :)
Awesome! Just so you know it is quite easy to call python functions from within R, you can get the best of both worlds.

I will have a think about the best way of implementing your suggestion for an R package. R is a little quirky as far as global variables in packages are concerned but your right, there is a lot of repetition in the code and it can certainly be cleaned up.