After multiple attempts to get the follower script to work with vectors, it is apparently not simple to do with Pandas data frames.

In the past, I would most likely have given up at this point (or maybe not even gotten as far), but now I can leverage the education to find a solution... 

Since the unique part of the vector for frequency was the signed angle, I just need to regenerate the .csv files from the spreadsheets after replacing the vectors with just their signed angle... If I need the whole vector in the future, it is simple trig to regenerate the line lengths.

This means a full rework of 8 spreadsheet lookup tables, but after the first is reworked, the other 7 are simply copied...

Then converting only what is needed to .csv

Then rolling back to an earlier version of the follower program... that part is easy when using version control software like GIT and meaningful commit memos.

So the setback is not that bad, and following software engineering best practices leads to this challenge being relatively easy to overcome.

Speed was looking good though, the entire program did run in under 60 seconds, it just was unable to determine the appropriate follower counts.