I actually use R mostly because of its data.table package. It is much faster and more concise than pandas, which is a nightmare to work with. Sure, you can get the job done in pandas, but you often have to wait ~10x longer for your commands to run and sometimes, I simply cannot use pandas at all because I run out of memory.
People are usually pretty surprised when I take the stance that R is faster than Python for the things most people actually care about, which is data manipulation and model building.
https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/
People are usually pretty surprised when I take the stance that R is faster than Python for the things most people actually care about, which is data manipulation and model building.