[vobios]

"If you know ggplot2"... but you need to make a lot of plots to get the hang of ggplot2. The "+" syntax (not sure what the proper name for that is) alone is completely foreign and intimidating.

If you want to make great graphs in R, you will need to learn ggplot2. If you just want to learn R, why not keep it simple at first?

[hadley]

Because the chances are you learning R to do data science/analysis. And you're best off spending a little extra work to learn the tidyverse - that investment pays off with an ecosystem of tools that all fit together to help you solve the problems you are mostly likely to want to solve.