More to the point (and my original question), are the Lightning devs doing soand if so, how?
I'm afraid I can't answer this bit as I don't know.
Sohow would you take all this networking knowledge, and apply it to routing and network topology in Lightning?
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I see plenty of speculation about what LN will look like, topology-wise. Yet much of that depends not only on what potential links are available, but also on how nodes use them. I dont see how a simple look-up table would suffice. If you are connected to A, B, and C, and you want to reach Z, thats not an easy problem. Its not easy in the first instance; and however its answered now, I expect that could be fertile ground for optimization in the future.
The lesson I would take from IP routing protocols would the introduction of 'areas' that allowed changes that occur in certain places need only be propagated within that area and have no effect on the network topology as a whole. The IP routing table in Internet routers is a simple lookup table, but these protocols keep the updating of that table to a minimum.