You're getting some pushback, but I tend to agree with you on matplotlib and pandas. Great libraries are designed so that you can get a feel for them and -- with practice -- use them intuitively. Even after years of (admittedly light) use I still find pandas' multi-indexes confusing, and I always have to look up the best of myriad ways to do something in matplotlib. In comparison, R's dplyr and ggplot have stuck with me even ages after giving up day-to-day use of R.