I've been researching a design recently and have faced the temptation freshly, so perhaps it'd be useful to share. Having investigated every 2D and 3D engine f

I've been researching a design recently and have faced the temptation freshly, so perhaps it'd be useful to share. Having investigated every 2D and 3D engine for the web (it's a nice UI, not a game), it seems none of the existing options scratch my itch: SVG and its huge complex object graph grind to a halt burning CPU after your first few thousand nodes, while game engines that can often cope with huge entity counts just continually burn CPU and apparently have no concept of 'idle'. So the itch is there: just a little <canvas>, a few wrapper objects, and I'm sure I'll be done in no time. Just gotta reimplement D3's TopoJSON renderer, that's all. Of course it's a lie, but at this stage I'm old enough to realize that :) I think the only way many people (just like me) in IT learn this is the hard way: be getting burnt too many times.