Yes, it is crazy. I guess this isn't really the place for it but ... From the official docs:

    The Figure is the final image that may contain 1 or more Axes.

    The Axes represent an individual plot (don't confuse this with the word "axis", which refers to the x/y axis of a plot).

This is infuriatingly bad and I firmly believe that it makes sense only to people who already know how it works. There's an image, axes (this word alone is a crime), plot, figure... it's like they took a bunch of synonyms and arranged them randomly to put together an API.

I dunno. One sets global values everywhere, then collects them all into a plot. The other creates a bunch of apparently disconnected objects, sets a bunch of different attributes on each one, and then gets the plot from one of those objects.

If I was designing something like it, I wouldn't recommend either. The global one has many fewer WTFs per character, but the objects one looks like it works in a multithreaded program or that you can create more than one plot without displaying them (but I've never tested this).

one is more or less based on matlab's plotting procedures, the other is an attempt at a cogent implementation of a OOP implementation. However, the OOP paradigm just doesn't seem very good for plotting.

Personally, I like plotting in R way better than in python. It has a lot better developer UX.