Matplotlib is like democracy, the worst option except all the other options. I do production quality plots for technical reports and matplotlib is the only suit

Matplotlib is like democracy, the worst option except all the other options. I do production quality plots for technical reports and matplotlib is the only suitable python library I've found that gives me the control I need. Like you say, there are lots of other libraries that combine stats (or other data analysis) and plotting. The paradigm I always use is to do the analysis separately, and plot the final result focusing on presentation and formatting. Matplotlib is the best I can find for this, despite the sometimes clunky interface. GNUplot is also good, but its easier to have a native python library. One more thing I'll say that had heavily biased me, I started off with Matlab, and I find that matplotlib is the closest to Matlab plotting, which is a lot of why I like it.