We went through sort of a similar exercise. The features that pandas provided was compelling. For example, our main research guy uses R and so something like data frames were wanted. My conclusion was that pandas was too heavy to add as a dependency however. sloccount says about 200k lines of code.

Instead, I wrote a small wrapper around numpy to provide a data frame like object (850 lines of code by sloccount). So far, this has worked well for us.