Here's another alternative. I wrote Dataiter specifically as I too was frustrated with Pandas. In my experience if you design a new API from scratch (and don't try to reimplement the Pandas API as many projects have done!) and have some vision and consistent principles, it's well possible to get a good intuitive API as a result. Two relevant issues remain: You're limited by NumPy's datatypes and their problems, such as memory-hogging strings and a lack of a proper missing value (NA), and secondly, limited by the Python language, so compared to e.g. dplyr's non-standard evaluation, you'll need to use lambda functions, which are unfortunately clumsy and verbose.
https://github.com/otsaloma/dataiter
Here's a comparison of dplyr vs. Dataiter vs. Pandas, which should give quick overview of the similarieties and differences.
https://dataiter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/_static/comparison...