I don't want to say that the Tidyverse is inferior, because it's not and it works for a lot of people. Hadley will also know much more about R and always be a b

I don't want to say that the Tidyverse is inferior, because it's not and it works for a lot of people. Hadley will also know much more about R and always be a better programmer than me. However, there are other tools which predate Tidyverse, which I think so a stellar job at their core competency. ggplot2 is great, but it was also around long before the Tidyverse concept. But at the same time base R plot() can also be pretty powerful[1] and look great.[2] As an alternative to ggplot2 I would also propose that Vega Lite[3] could be a contender, with an excellent cross language ecosystem. There are also libraries available for applying SQL on dataframes from directly within R if that's what you want to do. sqldf[4] has been around for a long time, and now there is also the new duckdf[5], which is a bit quicker. Or one can use the DBI[6] library, which requires a bit more coding. Learning SQL is also a great skill which has a lot of value outside R. Tidyverse may be useful, helpful and convenient for a lot of people, but I think we shouldn't lose sight of the wide R ecosystem which has provided a lot of alternative packages for a long time, perhaps without the marketing and profile of RStudio and the Tidyverse. [1] http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/posts/r_base_plotting_without_wrappers/ http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/posts/r_base_plotting_without_... [2] https://github.com/KKPMW/basetheme https://github.com/KKPMW/basetheme [3] https://vegawidget.github.io/vlbuildr/ https://vegawidget.github.io/vlbuildr/ [4] https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/sqldf/index.html https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/sqldf/index.html [5] https://github.com/phillc73/duckdf https://github.com/phillc73/duckdf [6] https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/DBI/index.html https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/DBI/index.html