For polar axes, set_xlim and set_ylim behave completely differently than on rectangular coordinate systems. One unfortunate consequence of this is that panning and zooming on polar plots doesn't really make much sense.

When I figured out this was an issue, I set out to try to create my own callbacks to add zooming functionality to my application. As it turns out, the inability of polar axes to support zooming goes quite a bit deeper.

It would be really nice if the polar axes had zoom and pan tools that do what you intuitively expect -- e.g. treating the x and y coordinates as though they belonged a rectangular axis with polar data. This would be extremely helpful for the application I am building which relies partly on displaying very large polar plots that the user needs to be able to zoom in to see what is going on and read text. It might be so important that I will hack it myself, I'm not sure.