The problem with data.table is that in practice your data gets converted to something else when you pass it through packages -- many functions will return a da

The problem with data.table is that in practice your data gets converted to something else when you pass it through packages -- many functions will return a data.frame or matrix, others in the Hadleyverse will return a tibble, and so on. So you have to constantly force your data back into a data table. R has so many datatypes that basically represent a spreadsheet/database table.