First of all, shocked people still use d3. Hasn't there been something better? It's pretty ancient by javascript standards. Do people still use jquery too? Haha

First of all, shocked people still use d3. Hasn't there been something better? It's pretty ancient by javascript standards. Do people still use jquery too? Haha... been about a decade since I touched this stuff! Second of all, isn't it ungodly slow? I get that it can draw a few boxes nicely, and maybe shuffle them around, but I had to write my own engine using html canvas because d3 couldn't get svg to flow properly if I had thousands of pixels in my image. Honestly, if you're going to go through the trouble of understanding d3, I would just write your own javascript canvas to animate things.