Why is that panda's problem? If you have scipy and numpy installed, it's just sudo pip install pandas....
https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/7517
As @mynegation notes, you can use Anaconda (or virtualenv).
This is the real killer. Any leads on making it less closed?
Also, I'm unfamiliar with how pip works, but you can't even install into your local user profile (i.e. w/o root)?