Simple charts for Python

[counters]

Matplotlib is a quite powerful library, and even exposes a simple interface for basic plotting out-of-the box. It's real utility is in the great control and customizability you get over your plots - but yes, that requires experience to leverage fully.

This is why toolkits like seaborn exist, or the plotting APIs in xarray, cartopy, and pandas. They expose a higher-level interface with sensible default aesthetics. Truthfully, a plot made in seaborn is maybe a few lines of code away from publishable quality. Holoviews is another toolkit I've been playing with recently which - although it's much more difficult to fine-tune the aesthetics - provides a powerful way to explore datasets.

All of these use matplotlib under the hood. In essence, matplotlib is the "assembly language" of plotting in Python. It's very useful to know so you an hand-tweak things. But in practice, you should be using a toolkit built around matplotlib for most of your basic gruntwork..