Few questions about Panda and the RenderPipeline

I’m considering Panda for a hobby project, but i’m very confused by the workflow of the engine. It seems very confusing and has lot’s of moving parts. Since i’m just a noob, maybe you guys could shed some light on a few things:

  • Do i have to compile the RenderPipeline with Panda?
  • Is there a CMake example that allows me to compile both Panda and the RenderPipeline as static libraries of my project?
  • It seems that the only way to put assets into the engine is via Blender with a special plugin. Isn’t there a converter? Engines like Urho allow you to convert FBX and DAE assets to their own binary format via a CLI tool. Godot accepts drag and drop. Both use Assimp to achieve this.
  • Are there any benchmarks that compare raw C++ SDK usage vs. Python?