I like the idea of Polars, and it's on my list of things to try. Unfortunately, my current codebase in heavily tied to Pandas (bioinformatics tools that use Pandas as a dependency). I also deal mostly in sparse matrices which I'm unsure if duckdb handles.

Another caveat for me is at multiple times in my workflow I drop into R for plots and rpy2 can convert pandas dataframes into equivalent R atomics. With Polars it would be just an additional step of converting to pandas df but just something I need to consider. That said, I've disliked the Pandas syntax for so long that the mental overhead might be well worth it.