This is exactly the reason I wrote {poorman}. The tidyverse is great for non-programmers. But as soon as something goes wrong and you start looking at the internals, it all goes to 💩

I have been saying for a long time that things like the pipe, etc are good for analysis code but should be avoided at nearly all cost for maintained package code. The pipe, and tidyverse more generally optimize a particular thing, and it isn't maintainability/debugability.

Another alternative conclusion, accepting (1) and (2) from yours: (3) replace current pipeline code with something similar, but simpler (e.g. poorman). Then you don't have to build, or wait/hope for someone else to build better tooling.

Base R will have it’s own pipe soon. The R core team have openly been discussing it