This is true, I've found teaching r to get things done is very fast and readable fully achievable in a semester compared to teaching pandas (and also having to teach how to program in python)

this is kinda funny to me. practically every social scientist I’ve known that had to use R was appalled by how cryptic and unintuitive it was.

I always understood that it was its open source nature being a successor to the S language that gave it traction

And people wishing to delve even deeper switch back to R? I don't use it, but I understood that most advanced techniques in statistics are implemented first, and sometimes only, as R packages, no?