Journalists have some problems that tend to be somewhat peculiar to their jobs. Some examples:

* A mix of heterogeneous and often internally inconsistent data.

* A lot of data that is categorical, free text or otherwise non-numerical.

* A need to be robust that is not always accompanied by the time necessary to become an expert programmer.

I'm sure some other folks have these problems too, though I can't think of any other industry where folks would touch as diverse a range of data as we do.

If works for other niches, great! But I'm a journalist and I had journalism problems in mind when I built it. I can't speak to the needs of folks in science, finance or what have you.

I'd throw history into the ring for something that would be similar in variety of sources, types of data, etc.

I'm looking forward to checking out the library!

Yes, good point! There's a lot of crossover there and also with digital humanities folks.

+1 for digital humanities folks. Your emphasis on well written documentation is a strong argument for agate over more powerful, but more confusing, data processing libraries. I'm already thinking about using agate in my digital humanities workshops!