I am requesting that mplot3d would not override a user-specified rotation given when creating an axes label. The following code demonstrates:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, projection='3d')
ax.set_zlabel('label text flipped', rotation=45) #this rotation is being ignored/overridden
ax.azim = 225
plt.show()