I really like the R tooling. What do you find clumsy about it?
It feels like the reason it’s popular is mostly just people not wanting to update skills
I have the opposite view. I find its the people who complain about R because its a bit different are the ones who are inflexible about learning new skills.
I found my partner, Jess, to be using some fairly niche packages for stats, which admittedly would be harder to replicate in other languages. I personally think it’s fine to use, there’s no harm, but as someone comfortable with many languages, most the people i found debating the pros of R (since this project and it coming up in discussion) often are in non software fields and it’s their only language. I personally wouldn’t choose it over python and i might even consider something old school like Java for similar projects if i didn’t have an audience that only understood the work in R.