I should have fleshed out my comment for sure, was in a bit of a rush! first off I found it interesting to frame R as being presented as an improvement over py

I should have fleshed out my comment for sure, was in a bit of a rush! first off I found it interesting to frame R as being presented as an improvement over python. should be the other way around. python for DS came second, and was supposed to improve over R anyway I'm not sure i can even begin to discuss your use cases, not having that much relevant experience there. I use R (and python) for general analytics tasks and for building production models. in these more traditional DS environments I strongly believe R is far superior to python for data munging and visualization. When I say this I am comparing data.table (and to a lesser extent, tidyverse) to pandas. I don't even want to get started on everything I hate about pandas. So while we are both "cleaning data" you seem to be talking about a stage before someone like me would even be looking.