[grenoire]

While writing my thesis I found matplotlib to be quite beautiful with adjustments only on the text (use LaTeX rendering to fit in with the thesis doc itself) and colour schemes; that is literally three lines of code at most. It's not ugly by default either, it produces very crisp graphics easily.

[kpgiskpg]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. I wouldn't put matplotlib graphs in a paper without tweaking the style, and it gets frustrating when you have to do this for every single plotting script you write. And the defaults certainly aren't colourblind-friendly.

[fock]

eh, you know, you can put your styles in a rc-file? and yeah, you have to load your defaults every single script (though you have to do that with every tool?!)