Other than that, I'd have to agree with you that mpl has quite a clunky interface. It can produce nice figures, but that generally requires lots of code to manually fine-tune the appearance of the figure.
Maybe it wasn't clear enough, but you cannot change linetypes of the series when using "seaborn". You could manually iterate through the generated artists and change those after the fact, but this largely removes any benefit of using their style interface.
