My immediate guess would be that they already knew SQL and had the data in there - and both R and pandas have a tricky initial learning curve if you're not fami

My immediate guess would be that they already knew SQL and had the data in there - and both R and pandas have a tricky initial learning curve if you're not familiar with dataframe style operations (hell, I was a pure math major some years ago and I have to contort my brain to do dataframes whereas I long since got comfortable with SQL).