While I obviously should have stumbled onto this earlier, I'll continue to ascribe it to Stata's unnecessarily (in my view) complicated graphics coding. Indeed, complications hamstring even the "simple stuff."
The example below involves "style" elements incident to the standard, simple barchart. The conventional "graph hbar" command generates the "typical" barchart (on the left). The "statplot" command (user-written, requires downloading), however, generates (to my eyes, anyway) the slightly less "cluttered" and more "intuitive" barchart on the right. (Click here for additional information on "statplot".)
To be sure, this admittedly subtle distinction pivots on mere aesthetics and, of course, neither barchart chart is "wrong" in any way. They simply convey needed information in slightly different ways. But if I took anything from Tufte's classic exposition, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, at some point "mere aesthetics" can matter. Or, if not "matter," can at the very least help or improve.
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