R does not deserve to be called awful. It is a language that works for many people, people make a living from it and is one of the fastest growing languages.

[1] https://blog.javascripting.com/2014/07/28/fastest-growing-ne...

[2] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2480920/r-programming-languag...

[3] http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/01/14/language-rankings-1-15...

Yes I have read [R Inferno] http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf

Have you tried the Hadley Universe? Seriously there isn't a data set that Python can do that R can't (Lots of ways to do things as opposed to Python's one correct way). Using dplyr has been a huge change in the way I do any data munging. Panda's has started using some of dplyr with new function assign. Dplyr really handles large data sets well like data.tables (data.table is fast and handles larger sets but I like dplyr's syntax more)

By the way i should have stated that Python is a good choice for doing Data Science it is just that R works better for me.

As others have said, try data.table.

You assessment is pretty accurate. R is almost the opposite of Python -- you HAVE to use lots of external libraries. Whereas in Python, the core is super solid, but the libraries you get are of varying quality.

R took me the longest to learn out of any language. I currently have coworkers struggling with R, and cursing it. But the learning pays off... it's pretty much the only option out there right now (and yes I use Python for almost everything, but you need R too.)

Have you tried data.table?