Meanwhile on clinicaltrials.gov the trial still doesn't have results 19 years after being completed. As far as I can tell no results from it have been published in a medical journal, either.

Without naming the company, this is disappointing. Company's webpage:"We are committed to disclosing the results of clinical trials on all applicable registries in accordance with applicable law." + "This clinical trial is now complete. When available, results will be posted on ClinicalTrials.gov."

At least, I hope you'd agree that the plot with colors, annotations on the plot, large font etc. is better than these slightly exaggerated disasters you might get by taking more of a default approach.

Is there something more clever than what the directlabels R package offers? The style of plot like in this hypothetical example (where geom_dl(method="smart.grid") worked well) is so useful. Yet, all too often it struggles to place labels well & I end up using geom_text manually.