Sorry for the off-topic question but would you mind to elaborate on why you can't stand ggplot? I personally haven't spent too much time with the r base functions but have come to absolutely adore ggplot for graphing and am thus very interested in learning about potential reasons to use r base plotting functions instead!
Thanks for elaborating on that, I was wondering too. In a very similar way (with a different outcome), my first real introduction to R was due to the "A Layered Grammar of Graphics" paper while doing some tangential research during grad school. I fell in love with the abstractions in the paper and reluctantly learned R so that I could get access to ggplot :).
As a side note, my research ended up essentially discovering Flame Graphs before Brendan Gregg was publishing/popularizing his version. His are much better than mine, but I take some comfort knowing that the ideas I was coming up with in grad school were decent!
I think it's just too different from base R, and I had spent too long in base R before tidyverse/ggplot became a thing. By the time it came around, I was already good enough to do basically all my plotting without it, and having to learn an entirely new set of syntax just annoyed me.
My reaction is much more emotional than rational.