> Young people producing bad code is not surprising. They're your grad students, mentor them, and maybe they'll adapt to your ways of thinking. Or not.

You’re right, mentorship is key and I do my best to suggest better practices. They are often quite happy to find out they can do more with less and can forget having to remember multiple additional syntaxes (looking at you “ggplot2”).

I somewhat understand why R instructors lean towards the tidyverse - Wickham’s group produces a ton of tutorials and workbooks, so it’s easy to just point students there - but it has led to entire cohorts of people producing poor code

For doing "more with less" in graphics, I would rather learn a unique syntax for a package that is based on the grammar of graphics (ggplot2) than use a package with standard syntax and some other foundation.