I think you'd better ask for a user-friendly GUI to R developers, although there are several.
In my experience, pspp works much faster than alternatives using large data, which is an advantage. For that and other reasons I think pspp should be further developed. I agree that PSPPire must be on par with pspp, but the advantage here is that pspp commands are easy to use by knowledgeable SPSS largely unchanged.
There is an approach to pivot tables in
R http://www.rforexcelusers.com/make-pivottable-in-r/ which could
perhaps be a starter for basic CTABLES back-end functionality?
Regards
Nigel
CJT