Hey, you're the author! I just wanted to thank you for writing this. I saw it yesterday, actually, and it set me off on an adventure: you mentioned seaborn, so I went and learned that (it's beautiful), which mentioned xarray (http://xarray.pydata.org/en/stable/) which is the generalized solution to the problem you mention!

I'm a bit skeptical, but, xarray's demos are very impressive. They do all kinds of geospatial modeling on ocean salinity, ozone, etc, and the data model seems general enough to create beautiful plots automatically (for various reasons, but mostly because of what you were saying in your post: simplicity enforced by constraints).

I'd love your thoughts on xarray, since it was such a serendipitous discovery in relation to your post. (If you're not impressed with xarray, then that's probably a useful signal that perhaps it's a step in the wrong direction on the ladder of complexity.) But either way, thanks for reminding me that "the solution is elegance, not a battalion of special cases."