Complaining about the inconsistencies of the matplotlib interface is pretty much beating a dead horse by now, and has been done repeatedly and in detail by others.
The problems start as soon as you try doing something more than plt.plot(), and you get your first encounter with the maddening interface differences between a single figure plot and a multi-figure plot. And then it spirals out of control from there.
There is no denying that a lot of effort was put in the library over the years, with lots of documentation and examples, but my general experience over the 15 years I've been using it is that as soon as you try doing something slightly different than the defaults, it invariably turns out to be a time-consuming, frustrating endeavour, with no guarantees that you'll get the result you want.
Sure there are some inconsistencies and legacy, but I wouldn't call that "horribly broken".
You're probably referring to plots with subplots. Those indeed have issues, although mostly not because of the API. This has somewhat improved with the constrained layout, within the old API. There's also now GridSpec for more control. And for EDA those don't really matter much. There are some annoying differences when calling Axis methods vs the global functions (e.g. xlim vs set_xlim).
Tweaking plots exactly as you want can get tricky, although for that the artist API can get you more or less anything you want. Care to share what's the library that gives you guaranteed results in no time and with no frustrations?
> You're probably referring to plots with subplots. Those indeed have issues, [..] There are some annoying differences when calling Axis methods vs the global functions [..]
When plotting is the basis of what a library does, and there are annoying differences encountered at such a very basic usage level, then it is not completely unreasonable to express some grievance about the syntax imposed to the user.. It is a frustrating user-experience to start encountering issues at such a fundamental level.
Tweaking plots, axis and layouts is tricky. Animating a plot with a bit of control is non-trivial, although I am prepared to concede that the two are different beasts.
My most recent annoyance was for something that seemed superficially easy: duplicating a left axis to a right axis, with a different label text, keeping the "original" grid and limits. Think of degree Kelvin on the left, and the equivalent in Celsius as a right axis. After more than 30 minutes of trying, I simply gave up as it was way beyond the amount of time I could justify spending on a single plot.
