Yeah, NSE (non-standard evaluation) is really annoying to work with in dplyr/tidyverse codebases, and this definitely inhibits people from building on top of them.

They are an 80% solution for a lot of data analytic needs, but base-R is 100% the right choice if you want your code to run for a long time without needing updates.

I've never really gotten into data.table for some reason, normally dplyr is fast enough, or I'm using something more efficient than R.