Good to see some geostatistics folks here; it’s an area I’m interested in. Your timing is good. I’m about to start adding better support for categorical variables to data-frames and if any changes are required for geo-stuff, now’s a great time to do it.
One caution: plotting, as it is documented now, should be considered deprecated. I’ve got on my local drive changes that bring the plotting system a bit closer to R’s ggplot. I’m using Vega-Lite as the backend and note that it has a geo-plotting capability.
Cheers,
Steve