On recipes: the first question should not about the philosophy of recipes, etc. but rather whether they are useful as a stopgap plotting solution. @ChrisRackauckas brings up an important point that these are a very nice addition for new users in the short-term. So even if recipes do not end up in the long-term solutions and if no new recipes are written, it could help out new users playing around with differential equations, etc.
More generally: I see a whole bunch of discussion of the philosophy of the design of plots, what Makie can do, etc. At the risk of being my grumpy self, this is exactly what I was hoping we would avoid by posting up this discourse comment. There are a million (all very useful) comments on the long-term solutions, where everyone brings up important points and many of the ideas simply need to be tested.
But this obsession with the long-term is clouding the thinking on the short-term: plotting is a complete and utter disaster for new users, and there may be low-hanging fruit to fix and buy a year until the longer term solutions are ready.
For example, if GR can get multiple plots to show up from the REPL, and if plotly backends can be made stable in jupyter, that takes us a long way to fulfilling the requirements I posted.