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.