We had same issue with Ext. We took a separate route to solve the same problem. Hacking around with the DOM is just not fun - and back then every browser had i

We had same issue with Ext. We took a separate route to solve the same problem. Hacking around with the DOM is just not fun - and back then every browser had its own set of quirks. Personally the approach you took probably required as many unit tests as an SPA unless you only had to support one browser for a very limited set of functions.