I don't think that two ways to do something is too many. It's nice to be able to just throw a plot on the screen with plt.plot(), but it's also nice to have the

I don't think that two ways to do something is too many. It's nice to be able to just throw a plot on the screen with plt.plot(), but it's also nice to have the extra control the figure/axes OO interface gives you. Matlab works the same way.