Juba, I have found that one can use qplot for most basic plotting needs. It's sufficiently simple, and the defaults quite reasonable, that I have my undergraduate students use it exclusively and they can produce excellent plots with limited experience. And the plot created by qplot [p <- qplot(etc)] can be modified by any of the full commands ggplot2 provides, which is handy (they are all stored the same way, no matter how they were created). So personally I use qplot for most everything, and save ggplot for inside of functions.
