I think this is key: there was a massive learning effort that went into the current dplyr interface. This risked fragmenting the community, but Hadley and his c

I think this is key: there was a massive learning effort that went into the current dplyr interface. This risked fragmenting the community, but Hadley and his collaborators navigated those waters effectively. That's super tough work and R benefits significantly from it. If I had a magic wand for Pandas, I feel giving that team the opportunity to rework interfaces without killing momentum and community would go so far.