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Agreed. Recent updates to rlang have made programming dplyr/ggplot2 functions a bit better, but it still feels super clunky. I use data.table for most things for programmability and speed reasons.

As much as I like ggplot2, I find the rest of the tidyverse to be solving problems it invents (e.g. quosures to fix the problem of not permitting string arguments for dplyr verbs) and monopolising an open source ecosystem.

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I struggle to find the logic in the data.table interface, whereas dplyr is a joy to use, at least interactive.

I agree that it is slow, and when things break apart, heavy the NSE use in dplyr really comes back to bite you.

I steer clear of tidyverse as well. At some point I used to like ggplot but this is because I didn't know lattice yet. lattice is a lot like ggplot but it doesn't come with "strings attached" and the plots look a little nicer.

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