I think monochrome is great for some uses, but at least for the area I work in the majority of figures use color. I'd say the main reason to use monochrome is for print, but most scientific journals are online nowadays and even conference proceedings are handed out in color. Now that doesn't mean everybody uses color well but that's a different discussion...
Too fancy? Too plain? Kinda ok? Kinda new to matplotlib, so your feedback would help :)
Just one idea, on your vegetable chart, you have onions as a red line and tomatoes as yellow. I would swap them around, as I automatically associate tomatoes with red.