I've had the complete opposite experience with D3. It adds one layer of abstraction (data binding) that is a little hard to understand, but pays off reams once

I've had the complete opposite experience with D3. It adds one layer of abstraction (data binding) that is a little hard to understand, but pays off reams once you "get" it. It doesn't do anything if you just desire to drop in your data - you need to build everything from scratch. On the other hand, if you start with good code or a good example and want to do something slightly different, it's very easy to modify to do what you want. The amount of code it would take to "do everything yourself" that D3 does would be an order of magnitude more.