That’s a great news that you’re coming back to development.
Though your goals sound reasonable, I would suggest additional items in the plan:

1. Don’t place rewriting the code on the first place, remember the phrase”premature optimization is the root of all evel”!!! Instead, make some quick wrapper class or a factory for classes you already use and leave it as is – when you really need to switch to another implementation it won’t take a lot of time.

2. Focus on more interesting things, like the view of the graph itself. Rightnow it’s pretty straightforward, nerdy, and only other nerds (don’t take it close to the heart – I’m nerd myself) will stick to it. If you add variable line thickness, color gradient, bluring of nodes distant from center – it would attract everyone’s attantion!

3. Do it all on JavaScript – it will be much more usable that way

4. Have a nice day! And not only during holidays!

Happy NY!