I personally find the Python plotting landscape a mess and confusing. It always seems to be a lot harder than is necessary to do anything and make it look good.
yes ... I feel like everyone is stuck in a local minima (or maxima, depending on your optimisation direction!) of using matplotlib which is "good enough" but not very good. So there isn't great momentum to improve it, but nobody really likes it. My favorite plotting syntax is that exposed in BeakerX [1], but that's less common than everything else put together.