Performance for animation and (custom) interaction is a real problem. But as for performance being "really really bad", there are not many widely used plotting libraries faster than it, at least for static plotting and zoom/pan interaction.
There are indeed many ad-hoc functions, typically for commonly used cases, and they tend to cover vast majority of common use case with very simple and concise code. If you want something more custom, the underlying artist API is very flexible. But you probably know this based on the 7-8 years?
Things like subplot layouts, data point annotation and legend tweaking can be really painful. Something like a proper box/model CSS layouting would be great.
There are indeed many ad-hoc functions, typically for commonly used cases, and they tend to cover vast majority of common use case with very simple and concise code. If you want something more custom, the underlying artist API is very flexible. But you probably know this based on the 7-8 years?
Things like subplot layouts, data point annotation and legend tweaking can be really painful. Something like a proper box/model CSS layouting would be great.