I agree that R shouldn't be used in production, but R is great for prototyping different analytical models before porting them over to Python or another language.

Same here and I think that’s exactly how its meant to be used.

Even so, if you want to use R as the production system, you shouldn’t implement the jumbled spaghetti code an iterative analysis involves just for your own sanity's sake. A rewrite is always required at which point hello Python