> What I think would be a nice approach would be someone creating a new Dataframe class that merely inherits from a Pandas dataframe but just implementing .filter(), .summarise(), .select() etc. as methods, using the dplyr syntax. If they return their own dataframes then chaining follows naturally. > I know that isn't how dplyr works, but it feels more Pythonic, and this solution isn't entirely analogous to dplyr anyway.

I think I agree. Pandas has a lot of overhead/baggage that I don't want 90% of the time. Being able to chain _simple_ verbs on a data frame would be great -- something like mtcars.groupby(cyl).summarize(avg_hp = hp.mean())