I use magrittr pipes pretty much exclusively because of the extra features relative to the native pipe, but I also respect the R devs' decision not to add those extra features to the core of the language. The magrittr pipe adds additional syntax beyond the pipe itself, namely the '.' variable to refer to the piped value (essentially it's just Perl's '$_'). It's incredibly useful, but it's not particularly intuitive the way the basic pipe is.