Agreed: anyone who learned R without Tidy had to grok some actual programming concepts, and can thus probably handle the things Tidy does themselves.

I admit a few of its libraries can save a lot of time (lubridate, stringr) but I still dislike the philosophy of having dozens of very similar functions. However, that fits RStudio’s general modus operandi of creating a huge, complex, and bloated R ecosystem, even as they espouse simplicity — really, they like regularity, and are happy to trade simplicity to get it.