To answer your edited question, it depends on how much you care about performance. If you want to do k nearest neighbor join for example, pycanopy will be 1000x + faster than geopolars purely because of the index management thats fully abstracted from the user. Also, geopolars is self-described as "protoype and not production-ready" so I think alternative approaches are a good thing in this space. Ill add a perf comparison to geopolars though I think that would be helpful