I feel like they (and everyone else) should just use SuiteSparse: http://faculty.cse.tamu.edu/davis/suitesparse.html
In the same way that people almost universally use BLAS and LAPACK or the MKL for linear algebra.
In the same way that people almost universally use BLAS and LAPACK or the MKL for linear algebra.
I realise my comment may have come off a bit flippant - it wouldn't be a trivial piece of work to write Python bindings for SuiteSparse, but would conceivably be simpler than trying to write a better sparse matrix algebra implementation.