As a very frequent R user, I actually find non-standard evaluation to be more hassle than good in most situations.

If you want to program with most of the tidyverse libraries, you are forced to implement a bunch of non-sense into your function to properly evaluate arguments within a function. Sure, NSE may be useful in some circumstances, but more often than not, it just increases the likelihood of introducing a bug.

Especially for new programmers, NSE is a huge leap and very confusing.

The old solution was exporting underscore ie: ‘mutate_()’ suffixed functions that used standard evaluation. And this was fine. But, then RStudio decides to deprecate these functions and force NSE on users. I’m not happy about that, and I often avoid using libraries like dplyr when writing functions so that I don’t have to deal with it.