This thread is old but I can't find any better information. Maybe someone could advise if the problem has been dealt with by now. The defensive comments by developers here are wild nonetheless.

I use psfrag to annotate and label plots because

1) I want to have the same math fonts (as in exactly the same) as in my latex document

2) I don't want to have to use maple to make a minor adjustments to figure labels

3) I don't want to have to deal with "switches", I'm happy with the way I do things now

"The switch to this way of writing plot text to postscript gives us a huge increase in the power and flexibility of plot labels, essentially allowing the ability to write 2D math in plots."

Says you. I think this is lazy developer speak for we want users to accommodate us. Shouldn't it be the other way around?

I'm an inch from thowing up my hands and giving up on maple for scientific publications.

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Edit: Spent a couple of hours writing code to dump data to file so I can use the old workhorse gnuplot. For what it's worth, academic papers require very particular graphical output for consistency within journal and paper itself. Having "nice" plots is worthless if they are not right.