But I don't want to learn 50 different tools that are all best-in-class. My use case is social media analysis of specific communities with fairly limited resources, so every hour that I spend on tooling is time not spent observing my subjects.
You're not wrong about the value of all the different tools you mention, but I think overlooking the integration and maintenance costs that a specialty tool can reduce, at the expense of some flexibility. I think that's the same reason many people prefer an IDE.
Learning the time tested tools almost always involves spending less time setting up / reading tutorials / etc. The time sink of betting the farm on latest and greatest data science frameworks is often gigantic and gets worse over time.
You're not wrong about the value of all the different tools you mention, but I think overlooking the integration and maintenance costs that a specialty tool can reduce, at the expense of some flexibility. I think that's the same reason many people prefer an IDE.