I am wondering why he bothered to send the data to an external service at all, while sitting in front of a powerful tool like R?

For simplifying shapes, you can e.g. use gSimplify from rgeos package.

See http://gis.stackexchange.com/a/151941/8202 for correct handling of the output.

I am wondering why he bothered to send the data to an external service at all, while sitting in front of a powerful tool like R?

For simplifying shapes, you can e.g. use gSimplify from rgeos package.

See https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/151941/8202 for correct handling of the output.