During last couple days, I have been programming in R intensively. To be honest, although I have been following R since v0.9, R is never a major tool for my daily activities. Most of my route analyses are better done in SAS or Stata than in R.
It has been said that R (or S) is currently the best statistical language, which I have not much objection to. But the learning curve of R is definitely steeper than those of Stata and other software. Again one could say that nothing is easy to learn if you want to do any serious stuff.
No matter which tool people are using in their data analysis, it appears to me that few of them bother to think about a fundamental question: what are data?