I have very quick flows for data processing: load data, make long form, add meta data as categories, plot many things with seaborn one-liners. I use Jupyter lab and treat it Like a full lab notebook, including headers, introduction, conclusion, discussion. Works very wel for me.
Julia?
Things that are OO based like C++ and Python are pretty bad at representing math because they put forward an idea of the actual representation (the object) as what matters, instead of the actions it performs (the function overloads). This may be good for some disciplines, but in a mathematical algorithm I really don't care what kind of matrix you gave me for `A`, I just want you to do the efficient `Ax=b` solve and have the action of the solver choose the appropriate method to abstract away the data. In Python you'd have to tell it to use the SciPy banded matrix solver, in Julia your generic ODE solver will automatically use the banded matrix solver when it's a banded matrix. This then allows for a composibility where the user overloads the primitive operations on their type, and your generic algorithm works on any data representation. This matches the workflow of math where an algorithm is proven on L2 functions, not on functions represented with column-wise indexing and ...
Yes, R is not my preferred language for anything heavy-duty, but I would guess ~95% of R usage is on datasets small enough to open in excel, and that is where the language truly shines (aside from being fairly friendly to non-programmers).
So yes, there are some problems with R, but what are your proposed improvements? Because if I have to analyze a .csv quickly, I'm going for R most of the time.