Hi, my team has never used a canivore before and are confused of what the purpose of it is?
Its there so your programmer will say “did you know that a CANivore is less expensive than its weight in Gold, but more expensive that its weight in Silver? Thallium is close to the right value.” 
All sarcasm aside, the CANivore exists to convert high speed CANFD (or regular CAN) to USB.
You can use this to create a second CAN bus on your robot. This spreads the traffic over two busses, and means that one bus can fail without totally stopping the robot.
With all CTRE hardware on the bus, you can run the CANivore CAN FD bus at MUCH higher speeds than the standard RoboRio bus. This is a pretty significant advantage for a swerve drive with CANcoders on it.
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And that’s exactly what you want to do with one. Put the drive on the CANivore (motors, CANcoders) using CTRE hardware, then put everything else (mechanism motors, encoders, sensors, etc.) that uses CAN on the regular CAN bus from the RoboRio. Your drive will perform much better and the other mechanisms will too.
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For our first swerve drive we ordered SDS modules outfitted for the Rev hexbore encoders partly because they were cheaper and mostly because our programmers like them. Did we artificially cap the performance of the system doing this? edit: we also plan to use a Canivore and pigeon 2.0.