Hi, I've built python-matplotlib with the patched gobject-introspection and it appears to have achieved the desired goal: LD_LIBRARY_PATH is not required anymore at run time.
To achieve that I updated gtk+ and atk. The version currently in master of those packages failed with an error which looked identical to the one produced by eudev. An update was enough to fix the problem. However, it is likely that a fix similar to the one I used for eudev would have worked as well. At this point I would welcome the offer made several weeks ago to make hydra build the branch to get feedback. Alternatively, if for some reason that is not desirable anymore, we could merge the branch into master and see how it goes. Thanks for your feedback, Fede