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!