Hmm I am curious, how would you do data cleaning without doing data exploration first -- and in what way do you find Python superior to R for that purpose?

Also I assume that by "something non-standard" you mean something other than a way to analyze it? Because there is really no comparison wrt available analysis packages between the two...

Not trying to say that R is perfect and great for everything, definitely not, I just have a hard time imagining a data-processing task for which I would choose Python over R (I might pick SAS over either one of them though...)