I, also, went with the POV-Ray route. I ended up spending a LOT of hours getting the information into a format that was pretty, but still easily readable. This wasn't just a case of reinventing the wheel, this was inventing mining, smelting, and wood working. The fact that POV-Ray takes its instructions from a text source file made it pretty easy to integrate into my final script, but the development time was prohibitive.
Just my 2 cents.

Update Posted an example of my code here: POV-Ray graphing example

oakbox