Best way to set the mapper scalar range for viewing?

that’s correct.

the LUT and mapper function by ‘mapping’ scalar values to actual colors. It appears that you’re looking to map scalar field values to a normalized 0…1 range or something like that. If you really want to do it that way, you can use vtkPythonAlgorithm to normalize the input data’s scalar values to 0…1 and send the output to mapper.