I applaud the project, and I completely agree that the concepts maps nicely to SQL. The R equivalent of a WITH data prep block followed by the VISUALIZE is pretty much how all my plotting code is structured.

However, I don't see what the benefits of this are (other than having a simple DSL, but that creates the yet another DSL problme) over ggplot2. What do I gain by using this over ggplot2 in R?

The only problem, and the only reason I ever leave ggplot2 for visualizations, is how difficult it is to do anything "non-standard" that hasn't already had a geom created in the ggplot ecosystem. When you want to do something "different" it's way easier to drop into the primitive drawing operations of whatever you're using than it is to try to write the ggplot-friendly adapter.

Even wrapping common "partial specificiations" as a function (which should "just work" imo) is difficult depending on whether you're trying to wrap something that composes with the rest of the spec via `+` or via pipe (`|>`, the operator formerly known as `%>%`)

We are not out to convince anyone to switch from ggplot2 (and we are not planning to stop developing that).

ggsql is (partly) about reaching new audiences and putting powerful visualisation in new places. If you live in R most of the time I wouldn't expect you to be the prime audience for this (though you may have fun exploring it since it contains some pretty interesting things ggplot2 doesn't have)

Side comment: |> and %>% aren't the same btw! The newish base pipe (|>) is faster but doesn't support using the dot (.) placeholder to pipe into something other than the first argument of a function, which can sometimes make things a little cleaner.