I really enjoyed d3 for the most impressive data viz products. However I always found the overhead to get d3 going and piping data to the explicit locations to

I really enjoyed d3 for the most impressive data viz products. However I always found the overhead to get d3 going and piping data to the explicit locations to be burdensome for most applications. My sense was that you would use d3 as a final polishing step for any data viz project/product or if you wanted to make a data product that had complicated requirements/display needs. I would be curious to hear if anyone uses it for data exploration or if the overhead has been lowered over the last couple years (its been 3 years since I've used it).