This has become my workflow too. Admittedly though I've spent most of my career writing large amounts of SQL, and was a pretty heavy Tidyverse user for a while,

This has become my workflow too. Admittedly though I've spent most of my career writing large amounts of SQL, and was a pretty heavy Tidyverse user for a while, so that all makes a lot more sense to me than Pandas. I generally get my data into whatever shape I need it in and then load it into pandas.