Yeah, I'd love it if mpl could be optimized. I do think that it has a lot of weird design decisions that could justify burning it down and starting from scratch (e.g. weird mix of stateful and stateless api), but I've already learned most of its common quirks so I selfishly don't care anymore, and my only significant complaint is that I want it to be faster :)

edit: regarding runtime, I'm sure this varies a lot based on usecase, but for my usual usecase I store a mostly-processed dataset, so the additional processing before drawing the data is usually minimal.