This is the key. R shouldn't be seen as a general programming language, but a domain specific language that's still open-ended. I started with SAS in my job,

This is the key. R shouldn't be seen as a general programming language, but a domain specific language that's still open-ended. I started with SAS in my job, which was fine for statistics and handling tables. But anything beyond that, even supposedly simple things like reusing code or listing all files in a folder, was not simple. With R, it was. R only had to be ergonomically better than the competition, and they weren't very good.