I use R because of my stat major also I am not fond of SAS. Also most bleeding edge statistic stuff are on R and no where else. There are tons of statisticians and other researchers just publishing paper, packages and code of their research and how to do it. R may be a one trick pony but it is very very good at that one trick.
You can see via The R Journal (https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2018-2/) and read through what researchers have done and published via packages.