John,
At >4600 lines, axes.py is getting unwieldy, as is the Axes class that makes up the bulk of it. I propose to reorganize it and split it into at least two files.
The main organizational change would separate the functionality that is directly involved in manipulating the axes from the more specific plotting methods. This could be done, for example, by putting the former in an AxesBase class, and then letting Axes inherit that. At the very least it would be nice to rearrange the methods so that all the pure Axes manipulation methods are together at the beginning.
What do you think?
Eric