> What we found was that R had alot of packages but most haven't been touched in years and when you contact the owner you find they've often moved onto the python/pandas/scikit eco system

As a "bilingual" R & Python user, I've found this to be true for the latter language as well :)

I don't have much to add on top of what other useRs have mentioned, except another testimonial that our company has successfully used R in production for 6+ years, from data "pipeline" stuff you mentioned to dozens upon dozens of predictive models of varying complexities.

When faced with a new data analysis ask, 99%+ of the time I reach for R (although without the tidyverse, that number would be much lower). Like another commenter said, the ease by which you can plot in R blows Python away. Seaborn seems like a decent compromise in my limited experience, but plotting in "base" matplotlib makes me want to die.