I remember people raising concerns about questions quality in the pandas tag before. The previous time I checked it, it indeed was filled with very low quality questions (you know, generally not all beginner questions are like that, but these were indeed) a bit more than I used to see in other tags, even popular ones.
It looked like a vicious circle of inferior quality questions hanging open for too long and because of that, getting a good chance to get answered, which in turn made tag visitors believe that it's okay to ask and answer like that, leading them to ask more of these inferior questions which were again hanging open and again getting answers and so on and so on.
Back then I even tried to somehow contribute to improving things by doing a bunch of close reviews filtered by pandas tag. This turned out to be a rather painful and fruitless effort and the main reason for this I think was a known issue of triage which blocks triaged questions from getting into the close queue for too long.
Thing is, it was not only me who noticed the low quality of these questions. System also correctly identified these and pushed them to the triage queue, where they were hanging for many hours (up to a few days - go figure) while being blocked from getting timely closure in the close queue.
What I observed in the queue looked exactly like harm done by triage. To start with, first I had to skip through multiple newer semi/decent questions that just turned "unlucky" to be of higher quality that prevented them from getting protected by a triage. You see, the close queue reasonably favors newer questions, but this reasoning breaks when triage enters into play and really blatantly close worthy questions that completed the triage get lower priority because of their age.
Okay, skipping that much was annoying, but still a tolerable amount of effort and time, I can handle that. What really made me sad and what made me drop my attempt is when the queue eventually managed to get to older questions that went out of triage and I saw how many of them have answers (at that age and in such a popular tag, why wouldn't they really?).
You know, I generally don't mind closing answered questions - when it happens infrequently. FGITW is an old game and it's only natural that rep hunters sometimes manage to slip through, and I learned to live with that (after all, it's kind of the flipside to Stack Overflow being capable to provide reasonably quick answers to appropriate questions).
But seeing that many blatantly poor questions answered is a different thing. This made me feel like voting to close these is like peeing against the wind. Even if my votes help close 40-50 of these (mostly answered) questions, askers won't try to improve - they will just retry the same way that was proven to work for them and get answers.
Even if I keep doing this curation for weeks or months and maybe get lucky to have few persistent askers of inappropriate (answered) questions banned, this won't help. At this point askers will know very well which way works for them on getting answers and they will just try to abuse the system to circumvent that ban with sock puppets, fraudulent voting and whatever else, making all my prior effort useless.
You see, the only thing I could do was to drop it and watch in despise how this swamp rots further and further.
Summing up, I think the issue with pandas is to large extent made worse by a system which currently functions in a way making triage work in a direction opposite to its intended purpose - shielding inferior questions from getting closed in time and giving them good chances to get an answer.