Honestly, it might partly be that I've used R somewhat irregularly and I put a lot of value in design choices that "make sense" and are easier to remember. I'm sure once you are intimately familiar with the whole base language you can be really happy and productive with it.

> I think the problem is the lack of tutorials that explain how to use all the data manipulation tools effectively, because there are quite a lot of functions and it isn't easy to figure out how to use them together to accomplish practical things.

Most languages solve this problem by not cramming quite a lot of functions in one package and using shared design concepts to make it easier to fit them together. I don't think tutorials would solve these problems effectively but I guess it makes sense that they affect newer users the most.

> Tidyverse may be consistent with itself, but it's inconsistent with everything else.

Yeah, totally agree and I really dislike this part.