Focus top-level API / vignette on key user behavior about bbsassistant HOT 4 CLOSED

I like feather in concept, but since adoption in the ecology world is somewhat limited I think it's an open question as to whether it's a good choice here. Given the size of the data I think the biggest benefit is using the package to educate ecologists about the format. Since BBS is <1GB in total I thing csv/tsv are both reasonable options that allow the data generated to be used cross-language. If you want the storage space read-time benefits of binary then since the usage is really in R I might just use the R data format. That said, as long as you're abstracting this from the user then I don't think it really matters. They just care about get_bbsData given them data in R, what the back end storage is won't matter to them - which means that any of these choices is perfectly reasonable.

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Thanks for the comments. I agree with the updates to retrieving, storing and importing the raw data.

@ethanwhite I am curious your thoughts on feather. The only reason I chose this was to reduce filesize and import times for users who are working with a large portion of the data. I suppose I could just create file extension options while defaulting to a TSV, TXT, etc.

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True that

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Ethan,
I have addressed this through a major functionality revamp, currently in master branch.

The functionality is much more streamlined, and arguably less confusing.

Feather is out. CSV/txt is in.

All functions requiring an internet connection first check to see if the file(s) exist(s) locally, and allow user to specify whether they would like to overwrite with new downloads, or simply import the existing files (using menu). This appears in the "get_" functions.

Thanks again!

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