Thank you @gra !
About three years ago I decided to make the switch to open sourced software as much as possible. It has been a long time since I have used any ESRI products and I was curious to see if there would be any new developments from such a big company that may change the way I think about GIS analysis overall. While the R-Arc tool was very interesting (I highly recommenced checking out the Github) I struggled to see why so many large businesses (like my university) are so fast to jump on the bandwagon when there are so many free options available. I will be writing a summary post later this evening where I will go into more detail about the pros and cons.
To be honest, I have also made an attempt to move away from GUI interfaces as much as possible (which has not been easy) as a means for separating my skill set from the rest of the job hunters. I have found that there needs to be a time-benefit analysis done when determining if a GUI like QGIS is best or if there should be a script written in something like R or Python (Julia is an interesting possibility for GIS applications as well as it grows its repos and libraries).
Thanks again for the comment I appreciate the meaningful conversation you bring to my posts!
RE: Should I Pay or Should I Go? Discussion on GIS Software