From my point of view, based on limited knowledge about all historical developments, I understand that Plots.jl was designed to somehow fulfill your suggestion. However, it seems that there was a will and a need for creation of other plotting packages that are not integrated with it. In general, I see it as a versatile world of Julia plotting. It has its advantages but also disadvantages. The main disadvantage for me is that I have to learn new things when I discover that some other package is providing abilities or ease of use that the one I am currently using is lacking. On the other side, I believe that such approach is moving things constantly forward. Having said it, I do believe that currently there is a way to solve a problem of “creating a figure with multiple subplots” when different packages are used, also at a level required for pro publications. At the same time, what I mentioned earlier, I would happily see a better support for basic geo plotting in the other packages than GMT and VegaLite. I believe for most of the people interested in geo plots, similar abilities as provided by VegaLite would be mostly sufficient. As addition, I will also allow myself to mention external package named kepler.gl that is not natively supported by Julia but is providing some abilities that are rather not present with any of Julia plotting packages currently. As a side note, I would like to strongly underline that I really had nothing wrong on my mind when addressing @carstenbauer a few posts above. Actually, I have to admit that I like his style of conversation very much, much better than sometimes suggested here so called niceties. 
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