There is nothing wrong with building abstractions though. In the end, they will need to be complex too, to be generic enough. I am not sure I like the model though, especially when looking at the advanced examples - it looked like there was a lot of imperative coding going on.

An alternative is using R for analysis work. I think that the hard part is typically getting the data and getting it into shape for plotting. Having done that I am a few lines of code from generating nice charts with ggplot2.

As an example, I have some small scripts that I run (myself or by jenkins) on a somewhat regular basis. They generate and update a bunch of static images attached to Confluence pages, using some loaders in java and analysis and render in R.

They images look extra nice with theme_xkcd :-)