Your comment brings up an interesting point. Sed, Awk, etc. are single purpose tools and that's one of the reasons their so long lived according to the common wisdom of *Nix. The other side of that wisdom is that once you build a swiss-army-knife, it gets harder to argue against just using a full blown programming language, like R, TCL, Perl, Python, etc.

I use R, and I still use ad-hoc commands from time to time too. I guess mlr and xsv lie somewhere between, which I've personally never really considered.

R is specifically designed for manipulating datasets though, and has a lot more functionality/dependencies. If you're already familiar with the language, and okay with the dependencies, it is vastly more powerful, more succinct, and arguably easier to use. Otherwise, something in between probably still makes sense.