Do people bash pandas? If so, it reminds me of Bjarne's quip that the two types of programming languages are the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.
The harder thing to overcome is that pandas has historically had a pretty "say yes to things" culture. That's probably a huge part of its success, but it means there are now about 5 ways to add a column to a dataframe.
Adding support for arrow is a really big achievement, but shrinking an oversized api is even more ambitious.