Personally I've never liked pipes outside of scripting one-offs because I've found them difficult to read. This is because in languages like R argument order can have meaning.

Even if the piped argument goes in a certain location by default, it still creates an exception to all the other arguments' syntax, which adds another layer of complexity.

I guess at heart lisp syntax has always made the most intuitive sense to me personally. algol/c does as well, but the more you mix them the more I tend to dislike it.

I guess pipes always feel like you're "proceduralizing" functional constructs, which makes things more murky (although maybe that reflects some deep equivalence between the two?)

This is just my personal preference, and in an R context. I could be convinced differently. Part of it too is I feel like R is fragmenting by lots of defacto standards, and not in desirable ways. I increasingly find myself wanting to use other languages, even more so than in the past.