> hm, all addresses have a subnet, even if its an implied /32, so
specifying a network as ("1.1.1.0", "1.1.1.255") seems a lot more
off-putting than "1.1.1.0/24". You're also much more likely to see the
latter in network devices.

I'm not sure which API in netaddr you're referring to.  If you want to
construct that /24 with netaddr, then I would use
netaddr.address.CIDR("1.1.1.0/24").  Offhand, I can't find an API which
accepts two endpoints of a range to construct a network in netaddr. 
When I wrote about having separate types for individual addresses vs
ranges of addresses in my previous comment, I had IP and CIDR
respectively in mind, as opposed to ipaddr-py's single IPv4 class which
can represent either.