[cycomanic]

I get your point, but disagree. I agree mpl is very powerful and you can do almost anything with it, but the biggest problem with mpl is the default behaviour for many things is just plain horrible. Take subplots, axis labels and ticks. By default pretty much any attempt will yield overlapping/obscured labels or way too much whitespace. Tight_layout helps a bit but in my experience you essentially have to manually tweak spacing and margins every time.

Similarly things like traditional x/y plots with a centre axis with arrows are much harder than they should be (it can be done but is really quite a bit of hassle).

And there are lots of other, similar issues. I suspect the OP is correct and it will be very difficult to replace mpl for producing publish quality plots (I think for interactive plots it's much easier and already done), despite it's shortcomings, because it is so powerful.

[maxnoe]

Try the new `constrained_layout=True`