I do a lot of data processing and my tool of choice is polars. It's blazing fast and has (like pandas) a lot of very useful functions that aren't in SQL or are awkward to emulate in SQL. I can also just do Python functions if I want something that's not offered.

Please sell DuckDB to me. I don't know it very well but my (possibly wrong) intuition is that even giving equal performance, it's going to drop me to the awkwardness of SQL for data processing.

I could anecdotally tell you it’s significantly faster and more concise for my workloads, but it’s a standalone executable so just try it out and benchmark for your use case. It doesn’t require fine tuning or even a learning curve