The problem in basic R graphics is that you basically spend all your time messing with margins and font sizes and the like. Not that there's no fiddling with gg

The problem in basic R graphics is that you basically spend all your time messing with margins and font sizes and the like. Not that there's no fiddling with ggplot2, but it's much better at not generating graphs with all your labels overlapping. Literally the only time I use basic graphics is for heatmaps (all the major packages still seem to use basic graphics for those for some reason). Ggplot2 may not be "intuitive", but it definitely is worth learning. And it isn't just an R thing anymore -- ggplot2-inspired graphics systems are beginning to be created for lots of other programming languages these days.