I'm not suggesting that ggplot2 is a crappy piece of software. Quite the opposite. From my working with it over the last couple days, it seems that it is rightfully the "standard" (as much as there can ever be one in the open source world) for creating graphs in R. What I am suggesting is that, damn, what a giant PITA just to produce some graphs.
Purists will be all over me saying that there's plenty of documentation out there and that everything works just as it should. Furthermore, the adherence to The Grammar of Graphics gives it some academic street cred. They are correct on both of these.
However...
I can create pretty much the same graphs in Excel in about 1/100 the time. If I spent the next few years doing intensive graphics work in ggplot2, I might get to where I could produce graphs in only twice the time it takes to do it in Excel.
Nor am I suggesting that Excel is the world's greatest graphing tool (though, it's pretty darn good). What I am saying is that this is definitely a case where adhering to academic purity is making things take waaaaaaaaaay longer than they need to. Be that as it may, the graphs have been ported to ggplot2 on R.
Yay for that.
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