I spent hours every day either taking pictures of organisms or identifying them online, just for the sake of it and without financial reimbursement. People who say you need a profit motive to do work are just passionless and detached from the world…

Looking at the R community, it seems like this isn’t necessarily true. You can find so many resources to very niche problems. The main difference seems to be that there are many people working with R because large companies like Google use it. The same is probably true for Python as well, but I’m not as familiar with it.