The reason big polytopes are so much work is because of poor design decisions in my polyview program. There's a built-in polytope query mini-language that it uses for selecting subsets of surtopes (for highlighting, hiding/showing, assigning textures, etc.), which works quite well for simple to medium complexity polytopes, but not so well for larger polytopes where you need to split a subset into individual elements to color, or there's no easy way (in the mini-language) to express a certain symmetry subset.
In the case of spidrox, it's particularly tedious because there's currently no way to select individual cell rings, so the only way I can get them is to generate graphs and transcribe cell numbers by hand. (Which is already not bad; it's better than transcribing individual edge/face numbers, which would have brought the entire PotM project to a halt

.)
That, and also because there's currently no way to save a particular subset / texture assignment for reuse, means that the rendition scripts have a lot of copy-n-pasting, which makes it error-prone, and also often has hidden dependencies on previous settings that aren't always reset later.
Also, when coloring a very large polytope, often the surtope subset that needs coloring contains elements that are touching each other, so individual elements have to be assigned different colors. The program currently has no automation for this, so I end up having to solve the graph coloring problem by hand over and over, once per subset of cells to color.

And it doesn't help that the code is quite old and I haven't really made any major changes to it for many years. And the original design wasn't really very well thought out, so there are some inefficiencies that makes rendering large polytopes somewhat slow, but fixing it would require a major rewrite. Anyway, I've been trying to get a revamped version of the polytope viewer program going, but so far haven't really succeeded. I do have a new program that can do vector arithmetic quite well, but it doesn't do anything with polytopes except load them into memory right now.

I'll probably end up incrementally transcribing the old program over, so that I don't have to rewrite existing scripts, which would require tons of time that I don't have.