[mikorym]

It tries to do html, but it is limited. So I'd rather use Javascript to manipulate the frontend directly.

It tries to do functional programming, but the documentation is not satisfying. The responses and behaviour is perplexing.

I spent around 5—10 hours trying to get a Shiny GUI to work and eventually got to the conclusion that 1) if you want a big project do all the frontend stuff in something else, like JS and 2) if you want a small project try something established (I am not advocating, it's just an example) like Power BI.

[mh12345]

Regarding the limited frontend capabilities, I had a similar opinion at one point, but with Shiny's HTML templating (https://shiny.rstudio.com/articles/templates.html) functionality one can circumvent the limited HTML that Shiny has out of the box. Besides that, there is also the possibility to communicate with R using JavaScript (https://shiny.rstudio.com/articles/communicating-with-js.htm...). These two functionalities combined allow for a frontend that is much more flexible, when compared to traditional Shiny applications. Of course, there might definitely be better solutions out there that fit your use case and Shiny's real use is primarily in sharing data analysis.