few things that do not completely address your points, but may help - python 3 (.5?) is adding the @ operator for matrix multiply. Of course this only helps

few things that do not completely address your points, but may help - python 3 (.5?) is adding the @ operator for matrix multiply. Of course this only helps you if your company uses python3 - There are 2 packages (seaborn, ggplot(clone)) which sit on top of matplotlib and provide a much nicer interface for statistical plots