[reallymental]

Finished a project very analogous to this, with marine vessel traffic data (AIS mostly).

It's fun to visualize these patterns, but the business case soon ran out. People don't really care about absolute numbers. Diff is what matters the most.

Most of the analysis is "OK, how does this value compare with one week ago". Can't really do that in QGIS/ArcGIS... no matter how pretty the visualization.

In the end, time series always emerges victorious in capturing the right information/visualization ratio.