One thing I do like about pandas is it’s pretty extensible to columns of new types. Maybe I’m missing something, but does Polars allow this? Last time I checked there wasn’t a clear path forward.
I added a column type for full text search, searching tokenized text (https://github.com/softwaredoug/searcharray)
The pandas support for extensions is very robust with extensive testing to make sure you can do all the data aggregations functionality you expect in and pandas column.