I don’t really understand, first you say the state of plotting is dismal, now you say you like PyPlot. I’m not arguing that everyone needs to use Plots, just use the package you like, like @Tamas_Papp says. Plots has lots of issues, but I personally enjoy it’s very julian approach to plotting. Note that it’s not a pure-julia solution, most of the backends require non-julia libraries.
BTW, in Plots you’d use tickfont and guidefont attributes to change the typeface, aspect_ratio to change the aspect ratio, and LaTeXStrings.jl to pass strings in LaTeX format.
Anyway, I think I’ve said enough on this thread - I only felt compelled to comment when you said I was blocking progress (still not sure how).