[MostlyStable]

I think it's just too different from base R, and I had spent too long in base R before tidyverse/ggplot became a thing. By the time it came around, I was already good enough to do basically all my plotting without it, and having to learn an entirely new set of syntax just annoyed me.

My reaction is much more emotional than rational.

[Breza]

I guess I'm lucky to have learned it in 2012 when base, ggplot, and lattice were all being taught at the same time. I love ggplot, but I dip into base from time to time when hist(students$age) is faster then ggplot(students, aes(x = age)) + geom_histogram()

[tonyarkles]

Thanks for elaborating on that, I was wondering too. In a very similar way (with a different outcome), my first real introduction to R was due to the "A Layered Grammar of Graphics" paper while doing some tangential research during grad school. I fell in love with the abstractions in the paper and reluctantly learned R so that I could get access to ggplot :).

As a side note, my research ended up essentially discovering Flame Graphs before Brendan Gregg was publishing/popularizing his version. His are much better than mine, but I take some comfort knowing that the ideas I was coming up with in grad school were decent!