Hi Martin, Indeed, it seems that ply and numpy are used by the optional dREL functionality. Nevertheless, the main module code is developed in a way to work without numpy as well. Thus I am not sure whether hard Depends on rather heavy python3-numpy (it pulls in blas and lapack) is appropriate.
To my knowledge, PyCIFRW is a CIF format parser. Thus I assume that not every application wanting to read in CIF will perform math on it. I would rather put python3-numpy in Recommends or Suggests. Best, Andrius