I think matplotlib's main strength is its breadth and power. It really lets you do exactly what you want if you spend enough time fiddling and digging through the documentation.
All this versatility comes at the expense of ease of use. It could certainly do a better job of making the simple common use cases more straightforward.
gnuplot arguably has similar power and versatility and it does make the simple stuff easier.
One thing that matplotlib is IMO bad at is interactive plots. They are very slow, and the controls are not intuitive. 99% of the time you just want to zoom and pan and those should be default actions.
gnuplotlib looks interesting and I will have a look, but these days most of the plots I do are in jupyter notebooks and I really want inline interactive plots so I don't think I will use it much. FWIW, what I use currently is plotly - the interactivity is very good (way better than matplotlib's) and plotly.express is very easy to use for the simple use cases.
All this versatility comes at the expense of ease of use. It could certainly do a better job of making the simple common use cases more straightforward.
gnuplot arguably has similar power and versatility and it does make the simple stuff easier.
One thing that matplotlib is IMO bad at is interactive plots. They are very slow, and the controls are not intuitive. 99% of the time you just want to zoom and pan and those should be default actions.
gnuplotlib looks interesting and I will have a look, but these days most of the plots I do are in jupyter notebooks and I really want inline interactive plots so I don't think I will use it much. FWIW, what I use currently is plotly - the interactivity is very good (way better than matplotlib's) and plotly.express is very easy to use for the simple use cases.