D3 is hard because it's not really a library. The claimed 'central abstraction', the stage (with data entering and exiting) is a trivial part of almost all D3 c

D3 is hard because it's not really a library. The claimed 'central abstraction', the stage (with data entering and exiting) is a trivial part of almost all D3 code! Almost all of the effort goes into 1) deciding when and how to invoke the D3 statements, 2) preparing the data, 3) event handling. Most of the code that comes with D3 has nothing to do with D3. If you look at a force-directed graph in D3, for example, you see how little the library gives you. It's up to you to decompose your data into nodes and edges, it's up to you to draw every shape, it's up to you to trigger a redraw using window.setInterval. And the examples are written in a dense functional, mutable style that uses all the advanced features of JS, SVG, and the DOM - and requires at least some understanding of academic visualisation jargon to boot. I believe that Bostock took the W3C seriously and wrote a toolkit that "goes with the grain of the web", preferring not to reinvent (or abstract) anything that was already widely available. It exposes the simple truth that the surface area of a modern, standards-compliant browser is enormous, and extraordinarily demanding on the mind of the programmer. And also, the dynamic, functional nature of JavaScript points programmers toward a style that is very much like that espoused by D3. And yet, I admire and use D3. In part, I think it's honest. If you program browsers for a living, you should master your dependencies! D3 really isn't there to hide the web from you, it entices you to learn the web that's already there. SVG is incredibly powerful and still underused by modern applications, IMHO. And no other library has the breadth and depth of layouts that D3 does, to my knowledge, and the layouts are the hard thing to program (especially performant layouts). So basically the price of admission is learning browsers really well (which takes years), and then you get access to all this sweet layout code for free! It's a good deal, if you ask me.