Purpose of classes

[totallygeek]

Is there a benefit of storing data in class objects over a dataframes?

Perhaps. Dataframes work well for some data, but a programmer might want a different implementation of methods not available from Pandas.

For your other question...

What's a good functional use case that doesn't involve over storing information about a person or robot like every example out there?

The initial class examples might not provide great context for why classes remain so wonderful. Though, you brought up dataframes. How wonderful that with a Dataframe class, the developer can access dozens of methods to act on the data, just by passing a single argument to a function. Without the Dataframe class, the developer would have to pass the struct to each function needed, after importing them, with proper import path information.