I agree with you.<p>Not just because tidyverse is "easier" but also because it teaches the right mental constructs to think about data.<p>I think beginners should spend a lot of time just thinking about normalization (Normal form and all that good stuff), and tidyverse directly encourages that.<p>There are some interviewers who want to test people's knowledge in the base language (particularly with Javascript), and I haven't understood that since you'll constantly be learning new libraries. It would be better to throw people an entirely new library and ask them to figure out how to use it.