It’s ‘read_<format>’ to read something in, but ‘to_<format>’ to write it out? In which world is this intuitive? Surely it should be read/write or even from/to?
Imagine you were using Pandas for the first time, working through a tutorial, and you've just learned that pd.read_csv reads a csv into a dataframe.
Intuitively, what would you expect the corresponding output function to be called? I'd hazard that a vast majority of people would guess at some version of write_csv, and would experiment with either pd.write_csv, or df.write_csv.
If you really just want to use loops and stuff (which I would discourage) just use a list or a dict or something.
Like my post said, I favor vanilla python over pandas... so yes, I use lists, dicts and somethings. FWIW, though, my workflow pushes everything into postgres, and things that would normally go into pandas are just accessed through SQL through and with helper functions.
That said, one of its best features, and probably the only thing I use it for these days is, `pd.read_sql(sqlstr, conn).to_csv(fp)`. This is far less cumbersome than using psycopg2.
Edit: for charting these days, similar to OP's visualiztions, I highly recommend vega-lite.