People don't seem to understand that matplotlib is the lower-level backend/API and not really intended to be a visualization interface for the average user. It'

People don't seem to understand that matplotlib is the lower-level backend/API and not really intended to be a visualization interface for the average user. It's a power tool. Matplotlib's users are other python developers making more high-level visualization libraries, like seaborn, pandas (df.plot()), plotly, ggplot (the python port/version). If you know the matplotlib API, then you can directly modify figures from seaborn, etc.