So that we can appreciate your point about the elegance of the API, how would you do the opposite to allow execution to take place on the data-frame?
[1] https://github.com/ggrothendieck/sqldf
[2] https://github.com/ianmcook/tidyquery
[3] https://github.com/phillc73/duckdf
I'm pretty sure that I'll be getting my hands dirty with R eventually.