I am a data scientist as well (ML/DL). This thing with RapidMiner surprised me a bit (I don't know what it is THB), but I guess it may be a totally different strand of analytics or stuff.

> would argue that R is ahead of Python in terms of libraries for everything but deep learning

Certainly there are more implementations of various statistics. Still I jump to R because there is something which isn't implemented in Python (some decision tree models, and things related to Item Response Theory - in my case). And just for ggplot2. :)

Yet, with "being ahead" it is tricky. For example, scikit-learn have a limited collection of algorithms, but once it covers something, it is with the same API and typically well-implemented.