I definitely felt that way when learning matplotlib at the start. But, after spending a good amount of time learning the object oriented api I find it insanely expressive. It can get verbose, however I have full control over every part of the viz. The worst feeling for me is spending an hour to get plot to a good spot just to learn all the finishing touches of like to make to the axes, ticks, annotations, etc are not possible or only possible via hack. matplotlib May have some large initial hurdles but once you get over those you get full control of your viz. To be fair, there’s no reason one should have to suffer as much as one does when learning matplotlib. It’s worth it to stick it out imo.