Not a specific dig against you, but I find it useful to write (and say) anything with the assumption that the author I'm (hypothetically) addressing is a direct witness.
It really helps with online civility :)
I'm relatively new to technical writing and the discussion from all of these comments (yours included) has been really helpful for guiding how I write future posts.
HN is (in my experience) a lot more cynical and straightforward than other places[1]. It's something I've learned to appreciate and also take it with a grain of salt.
I agree with you where some here don't. I think there are often better tools for any single data cleaning task.
R's strength is being second best at an enormous range of tasks (and often being first to get new techniques) and packaging that with analysis and visualization.