Hi Brooks,
Your questions are timely. I am working on a set of tools for network analysis/smart location database generation that I want to opensource at some point in 2018. I am working with Google Datalab to work with NetworkX (Vs 1.5.0), Geopandas, and Pandana to get a workflow taking data processed & edited in ArcGIS into pandana/networkx graphs.
Questions I am interested in answering rest with accessibility analysis and how different graph indexes can be used to determine an edges importance to overall network connectivity (as part of a prioritization analysis). For the time being I am contemplating pandana/networkx for the task outside of ArcGIS (the speed of pandana queries is part of the reason). I will have some code samples later, but I have been referring to SEMCOG code that provides some examples on converting NetworkX (import shapefile) graphs to Pandana....
Hope you find this helpful. If you want to collaborate on this, also willing to talk about that.
Thanks,
David
David Wasserman, AICP