I spend more time working around panda's strange isms than it takes me to write vanilla python that does the same thing. The index problems are not just a small annoyances, and sometimes can waste hours because of its awkward defaults. For example, its default in df.to_csv to write an index (without a column name..)! It doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever that reading a csv, then writing the csv would add a new column. I'm really tired of rerunning pandas code after I forget to turn that stupid default index setting off. Is that a small thing? Sure. But it had tons of small things like that.

It's funny you complain about the index being saved in csv files, which is the default behaviour in R.

Not in tidyverse, but yeah indexes in pandas are a souped up version of rownames in base R.