Perhaps atleast some of the python visualization libs are built upon Matplotlib. I do feel that Matplotlib is kind of unintutive, trying in some ways to emulate

Perhaps atleast some of the python visualization libs are built upon Matplotlib. I do feel that Matplotlib is kind of unintutive, trying in some ways to emulate Matlab, which isn't an elegant system to start with. For people directly using python without any prior experience with matlab, that is unnecessary baggage. Also 3d plotting and graphing needs much more features. Trying to plot vectors in 3d, I found things are still very rudimentary. Even for surfaces, if you want to plot an ellipsoid, for eg, you need to reformulate the surface in polar form, then only matplotlib is able to generate it, were as Mathematica can generate surfaces from Cartesian expressions.