Have you tried plotnine? It's a faithful port of ggplot to python. It's built on top of matplotlib, so no interactivity, but I have not noticed any problems with leaky abstraction.
no, unfortunately not. it's been a while since i've looked but i think mpld3 and plotly were the best bets when i last was trying to make use of notebooks.
i've personally never been a big fan of the horizontal breaks in the editor that notebook experiences provide. more recent versions of jupyter have added a side-by-side mode which is kind of an improvement but it still doesn't go where i'd fully want, which would be a full blown editor pane with a full blown document pane that sit side by side and are linked by user placed anchors with plots that can be popped out and floated.
