I recently had to make several charts (and types of charts). I found that to make a chart in d3 I essentially needed to know the nuances of how SVGs are created

I recently had to make several charts (and types of charts). I found that to make a chart in d3 I essentially needed to know the nuances of how SVGs are created. I was also frustrated by the data format restrictions. Like my data was in X format but X format was unusable by d3; I needed to transform it into Y format. But now Y format was not usable for me in the rest of my app. My conclusion was to just draw SVGs on my own and skip d3. Well I used it for some of the nicer function like determining nice axis label spacing and formatting strings. But, I basiclaly cut d3 out of the loop and things are better off. If you know what you want your graphics to look like and they are relatively basic (maybe d3 is better a complicated charts, I didn't get that deep) then skip d3 and just create the SVGs themselves.