As someone who has suffered through a few different smallish projects with R, I don't think it would be even remotely worth using without ggplot2 and Hadley's o

As someone who has suffered through a few different smallish projects with R, I don't think it would be even remotely worth using without ggplot2 and Hadley's other amazing contributions, especially dplyr and rvest. Easy to find flaws in R, but ggplot2 makes it easy-ish to produce nice-looking plots.