I'd go out on a limb and say the rock-solid out-of-the box experience is what is keeping many people using R-studio (and even R itself), rather than the messy ecosystem of Python. I'm seeing this tendency in myself for some tasks.

Also, my impression is that that is also a big part of why MATLAB still exists, despite outraging prices.

I think the common theme among these tools' main user groups is that they are not developers. They are not comfortable fiddling a lot with a dev environment, but can be productive in an environment where everything just works.

Thus, if Positron can get the same smooth and rock-solid out-of-the box experience, it will be able to reach a lot of these non-developer user groups.

At least that's my 5c.