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The good news is I don't think there is a feature in the tidyverse you couldn't do with base R, albeit in an "R way." I think the main sell of tidyverse is the sexier plots from ggplot2 and some quality of life functions. Maybe others can comment if there is more there. The annoyance of 85% of stack overflow R comments starting off with sourcing the tidyverse library was enough to push me away and develop a base R solution whenever I had an issue.

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I think the appeal to the tidyverse "universe" is the readability of the code. Especially to novel users of R (and there are a lot of people in science that have to generate a plot once a month or so). ggplot2 works fine if you only use that package without the rest of tidyverse. I personally use the data.table package a lot and than generate plots using ggplot2. Stackoverflow is indeed very much focused on tidyverse packages which is a pity as indeed base R can solve so many problems posted too without the need of additional packages.

That's the thing of it, too. It's pretty looking code, but it's not R. It's its own foo you now have to spend time learning on top of R.

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