Used pandas for years and it always felt like rolling a ball uphill - just look at doing something as simple as a join (don't forget to reset the index).

Polars feels better than pandas in every way (faster + multi-core, less memory, more intuitive API). The library is still relatively young which has its downsides but in my opinion, at minimum, it deserves to be considered on any new project.

Easily being able to leverage the Rust ecosystem is also awesome - I sped up some geospatial code 100X by writing my own plugin to parallelize a function.