And for options utilizing grammar of graphics (really worth knowing, even if you're not coming from the R world) you have ggplot and plotnine, which are both sort of ports of ggplot2 from R.

> "grammar of graphics (really worth knowing, even if you're not coming from the R world)"

Can you explain why? I've never gotten the appeal. Besides the concept, the classic implementation (ggplot) does not make nice graphs in my opinion. To me these look wrong... I guess I'm not quite sure why. There is something about it too cookie cutter, cartoonish and information-light: http://r4stats.com/examples/graphics-ggplot2/

ggplot has many built-in themes if you dislike the defaults. theme_minimal() is a newer one which is close to the FiveThirtyEight style and it works great.

It looks better, but still I don't really get what is so great about ggplot. With base R I can pretty much make a chart look however I want based on the context, if it is just something quick and easy for me to check something (where axis labels dont really matter etc) it is like one line of code too.