Currently, the code to handle fetching the "next set of properties in the cycle" is handled in _plot_process_args, which is used by methods that handle multiple plots in one command, but isn't really used much elsewhere (except in hacky ways) elsewhere.

It seems to me that if we handled this in add_line, add_patch, add_collection and friends, we could properly handle default colors everywhere. But that's an untested theory and I thought I'd raise the issue with @WeatherGod and @tacaswell who have looked at property cycling much closer than I recently.

I'm coming across this as part of the style changes where I'm taking out a lot of the hardcoded styles in the examples and discovering that many things don't handle cycles correctly that probably could.